I Saw Israel as the Aggressor. Then I Saw the Intelligence on Iran. I Was Wrong.

Let me be unequivocal at the start: I believed the dominant narrative. I built a career on it. When the first reports of ‘Operation Am Kelavi’ flashed across my screen, my reaction was not one of journalistic inquiry, but of grim, cynical confirmation. For me, and for many of my colleagues, the story was already written.

I saw the headlines about strikes on Tehran’s Evin Prison and read the casualty counts—71 dead, including prisoners and visiting families. I absorbed the reports from AP and Al Jazeera naming the seven medical centers that had been hit, detailing the deaths of doctors and nurses. These weren't allegations to me; they were the predictable, bloody outcome of Israeli military action. They catastrophically refuted every claim of ‘surgical precision’ and confirmed a pattern of behavior I had come to see as inherent.

I nodded along as the 'Netanyahu’s political gambit' narrative shifted from opinion columns to hard news. When President Trump’s statements linked U.S. aid to the Prime Minister’s corruption trial, it felt like the final piece of evidence. The idea of a ‘necessary pre-emptive strike’ seemed like a transparently cynical ploy for political survival. And hovering over it all was the ghost of Gaza. The relentless, heartbreaking images of civilian suffering there had created a permanent filter through which I viewed any Israeli use of force. It primed me, and the world, to see any action as inherently immoral, any justification as a lie.

When I saw the state-sponsored funerals in Iran, with seas of mourners grieving their commanders, I dismissed Israel's message of ‘liberating the Iranian people’ as not just hollow, but insulting. The visual evidence was overwhelming: this was a nation unified in grief against an external attacker. My worldview was coherent, consistent, and damning. And it was almost completely wrong.

The shift didn’t happen in a flash of divine intervention. It began with a gnawing inconsistency, a single thread that, when pulled, unraveled the entire tapestry of my certainty. The catalyst was a late-night conversation with a quiet, terrified source—an Iranian engineer who had defected months earlier. He didn't speak of politics. He spoke of physics. He described, with chilling precision, the work being done at a facility I’d never heard of, a deep-earth installation that was not on any public IAEA report. He spoke of weaponization schedules and enrichment levels that were not just past the ‘point of no return,’ but sprinting towards a finished, deliverable device. He said, his voice trembling, “They don’t negotiate. They stall. They were weeks away, not years.”

His story was terrifying, but it was just one man. It was what happened next that forced my reckoning. Through backchannels, I was shown a portion of an intelligence assessment. It wasn't an Israeli report; it was from a neutral European agency. It contained satellite imagery and signals intelligence that corroborated the engineer’s story. But it also showed something else, something that made my blood run cold. It showed the exact locations of IRGC strategic command-and-control bunkers. One was located in a sub-basement directly beneath the administrative wing of the Ibn Sina hospital. Another was tunneled into the rock beneath the notorious Evin Prison.

Suddenly, the narrative of indiscriminate bombing inverted itself. The question was no longer, “Why did Israel strike a hospital?” but “Why did the Iranian regime embed its nerve center for regional terror underneath dying patients and political prisoners?” The responsibility for those civilian deaths didn't just become complicated; it shifted entirely. The Iranian regime had not only used its people as human shields but had done so with a sickening, strategic logic. It was a pre-packaged war crime, ready to be served to a willing international media. And I had been a voracious consumer.

This forced me to re-examine everything. The 'Netanyahu’s gambit' theory, so compelling on the surface, began to look like a dangerous oversimplification. The intelligence I saw pointed to a threat so imminent and so catastrophic that any Israeli leader—left, right, or center—would have been forced to act. To focus on the Prime Minister’s personal politics was a convenient way to avoid confronting the horrifying alternative: that a genocidal regime, which hangs homosexuals from cranes and chants “Death to America,” was on the verge of acquiring the one weapon that could make its apocalyptic ambitions a reality. The choice wasn't between war and peace. It was between a limited, targeted strike now or a potential nuclear holocaust later. Israel’s action was not an act of escalation; it was a desperate, last-ditch effort at de-escalation on a global scale.

I was forced to confront the moral contrast I had so long ignored. We see Iran fire hundreds of indiscriminate missiles at Israeli cities, designed to cause maximum civilian terror. And we see Israel execute a technologically audacious operation that, despite the tragic and Iran-induced collateral damage, decapitated the leadership of the IRGC and its nuclear program. A world without Qasem Soleimani’s successors, without Mohsen Fakhrizadeh’s protégés, and without an operational IRGC is an objectively safer world. It is a better world for Western capitals, for Sunni Arab states, and, most of all, for the oppressed people of Iran who live under the boot of that very organization.

I don’t write this with the zeal of a convert. I write this with the humility of a man who was professionally and morally certain, and who discovered that his certainty was built on a foundation of incomplete truths and sophisticated enemy propaganda. The easy narrative of Israeli aggression is comfortable. It requires no deep thought and aligns with pre-existing biases. But the truth is far more complex and uncomfortable. Israel is not a perfect actor, but in this instance, it was the only actor willing to stand between the world and a nuclear-armed terror state. It did not act as an aggressor. It acted as the region's and the world's last line of defense. It was a brutal, difficult, and necessary act of heroism, and we should be grateful it wasn't our children who had to carry it out.