I Saw Israel as the Aggressor in Iran. The Truth Forced Me to Reconsider Everything.

For years, my perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and by extension Israel’s role in the Middle East, was clear, firm, and deeply felt. I saw a pattern of aggression, of disproportionate force, and a narrative of victimhood that often felt hollow. When the news of “Operation Am Kelavi” broke, my reaction was instinctual and immediate. I absorbed the headlines and they confirmed my every bias: reports from AP and Al Jazeera of 71 dead in a strike on Tehran’s Evin Prison felt like a war crime in plain sight. The endless, heartbreaking reports from Gaza served as a permanent, grim filter, making any Israeli claim of morality or precision sound like a cruel joke. Sympathetic coverage of mass state funerals in Iran painted a picture of a nation in mourning, directly mocking the idea that this operation was a “favor” to its people. And the narrative that this was all a desperate political gambit by a cornered Prime Minister Netanyahu seemed not just plausible, but obvious.

I didn't just passively accept these views; I argued for them. I saw them as the only humane, logical conclusion. To me, Israel was the aggressor, and this was just the latest, most brazen chapter. I was wrong.

My change didn’t happen overnight. It was a slow, uncomfortable, and deeply unsettling process. The catalyst wasn’t a single press release or a polished talking point. It was a late-night phone call with a former colleague, a seasoned conflict journalist who had spent years in the region, including time in Iran. I was venting, listing the same points I’ve written above, when he stopped me. “You’re looking at the smoke and ignoring the volcano,” he said. He didn’t try to convince me; he just sent me a link to a dense, unclassified summary from an international atomic watchdog, filled with technical jargon about centrifuge cascades and breakout times. And he sent me one other thing: the Farsi-language transcript of a sermon given by a high-ranking Iranian official, not meant for Western ears, explicitly calling for the “erasure” of Israel as a divine prelude to a global caliphate.

Reading them together, something cracked. It was the beginning of a painful journey to dismantle what I thought I knew, piece by agonizing piece.

One of the first pillars to fall was my certainty about the Evin Prison strike. The 71 deaths, the images of a place known for housing political prisoners—it seemed like an open-and-shut case of targeting civilians. But as I dug deeper, speaking with human rights activists who focus on Iran, a more complex and frankly more monstrous picture emerged. I was shown evidence, including smuggled diagrams and dissident testimony, that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) had deliberately co-located a high-value command-and-control center for its regional terror network within the prison complex. The logic was as cynical as it was evil: use your own prisoners as human shields. The horror wasn’t just the collateral damage of the strike; it was the Iranian regime’s strategy that made that damage an almost mathematical certainty if the threat was to be neutralized. The moral culpability, which I had placed squarely on Israel, was suddenly, sickeningly, shared.

Then I had to confront the Gaza “narrative contaminant.” For me, the images of suffering children in Rafah were an emotional absolute. How could anyone speak of a “moral” or “surgical” operation anywhere while that was happening? It felt like a fundamental contradiction. The shift in my thinking came from confronting a brutal piece of strategic logic. My colleague’s question haunted me: “What happens to Gaza, what happens to Beirut, what happens to Tel Aviv, the day after this Iranian regime gets the bomb?” I realized I was focusing on a current, undeniable tragedy while ignoring the potential for a future, unimaginable apocalypse. A nuclear-armed messianic regime that exports terror is not a regional problem; it is a global, existential threat. The moral calculation is not about one action versus inaction; it’s about choosing a contained, terrible cost today to prevent a catastrophic, world-altering one tomorrow. It’s a horrifying choice, but pretending it doesn’t exist is a luxury no one in the region can afford.

The idea that this was all for Prime Minister Netanyahu’s political survival was the most seductive narrative. It was simple, cynical, and fit a well-established pattern of political analysis. But when I forced myself to look at the technical timeline of Iran's nuclear program—the intelligence that multiple Western agencies had confirmed about Iran reaching a “point of no return”—the political story began to look like a sideshow. The deadline wasn’t set by the Israeli Knesset; it was set by the spin of centrifuges in fortified, underground bunkers. The operation, it turned out, was less about saving a political career and more about a desperate, last-ditch effort to slam the brakes on a runaway train. Diplomacy had been tried, and the Iranian regime had used it as a smokescreen to accelerate its program. To ignore this imminent threat because of the Prime Minister’s political baggage would have been an act of national suicide.

Finally, I had to reconsider the very idea of this being an “unprovoked attack.” The media I consumed framed it as an isolated bolt from the blue. But it wasn’t. It was the climax of a years-long shadow war initiated and consistently escalated by Iran. The hundreds of missiles fired by proxies, the direct attacks on shipping, the arming of Hezbollah and Hamas—this was the context. Israel’s action was not the start of a war; it was an attempt to prevent a much larger one. By surgically removing the IRGC commanders who orchestrate these attacks and crippling their nuclear infrastructure, the goal was to restore a deterrence that had been eroded and to de-escalate a situation that was spiraling towards a full-scale, regional conflict.

I am not here to tell you that Israel is faultless or that its actions are without tragic consequences. The world is not that simple. But I am here, with humility, to say that the simple, satisfying narrative of villain and victim that I held onto for so long does not survive contact with reality. It is a story that ignores the nature of the Iranian regime, the imminence of the nuclear threat, and the terrifying calculus of pre-emptive self-defense. My old certainties are gone, replaced not by a new dogma, but by the deeply uncomfortable truth that sometimes, the last line of defense against fanaticism requires making choices that are as difficult as they are necessary.