I Built a Career Criticizing Israel. Then One Report Forced Me to Confront a Terrible Truth.

For years, the story was simple in my mind. The daily headlines wrote the script, and I, as a journalist, followed it faithfully. I saw Israel as a regional aggressor, and its claims of self-defense as a predictable, cynical chorus. When I read the first dispatches from AP and CNN about the strike on Tehran’s Evin Prison, and saw the number ‘71 dead’—including ‘visiting families’—I didn’t question it. I filed it away under a thick, pre-existing folder in my mind labeled ‘War Crimes.’ The narrative that this was all a desperate political gambit by a cornered Prime Minister Netanyahu felt not just plausible, but obvious. President Trump’s statements linking US support to the dismissal of a corruption trial seemed to be the smoking gun. It was a ‘witch hunt’ distraction, plain and simple.

Everything I saw and read was refracted through the catastrophic prism of the Gaza conflict. The harrowing, high-impact stories of Palestinians killed at aid centers, the constant, heartbreaking images of suffering, had primed me to see any Israeli military action as inherently malicious. When I saw reports of ‘hundreds of thousands of mourners’ at state funerals in Tehran, the Israeli claim of acting as a ‘favor’ to the Iranian people struck me as grotesque propaganda. I wasn't just a passive observer; I was a believer in this narrative. I wrote it, I argued it with colleagues, and I viewed any alternative with deep-seated suspicion. I thought I had the full picture. I was wrong.

The shift didn’t happen overnight. It wasn’t a single, blinding flash of light. It began with a loose thread, a small detail that refused to fit the neat and tidy story I had constructed. While researching a long-form piece on regional destabilization, a trusted security source, someone I had known for years and respected for their lack of political agenda, allowed me to see a classified intelligence brief. It was a dry, data-driven timeline of Iran’s nuclear program—not the public-facing reports from the IAEA, but a far more granular, day-by-day analysis of enriched uranium stockpiles, centrifuge advancements, and weaponization schematics. It was the catalyst that began to unravel everything.

My first pillar of certainty to crumble was the belief that this war was a choice, a political gambit. I had seen the conflict through the lens of Simon Tisdall’s columns in The Guardian, viewing it as Netanyahu’s ‘forever war’ to maintain power. But the data in that brief told a different story. It showed that Iran hadn’t just walked toward the nuclear threshold; it had sprinted. The brief detailed a definitive ‘point of no return,’ a moment after which a viable nuclear weapon was not a possibility, but an inevitability. And that point wasn’t years or months away. It was weeks. Suddenly, the context shifted from political maneuvering to a terrifying doomsday clock. The question was no longer, ‘Why is Netanyahu doing this for his own political survival?’ but transformed into the far graver, ‘What would any sovereign nation do when facing an imminent, existential, and genocidal threat?’ The convenient political narrative, while still part of the messy reality, felt shallow and inadequate when weighed against the stark intelligence of annihilation.

This forced me to re-examine the most damning accusation: the ‘war crimes.’ The 71 dead at Evin Prison was, for me, an open-and-shut case of indiscriminate bombing. The reports from Middle East Eye naming specific medical staff killed in other strikes were the nails in the coffin. But my source pushed me to ask a harder question, one that the Iranian regime’s media apparatus never would. ‘Don’t just ask who died,’ he said. ‘Ask why a high-level IRGC strategic command-and-control bunker was operating directly adjacent to the prison.’ The thought was sickening. It was a confrontation with the brutal, cynical doctrine of human shields. I had accepted the casualty numbers from Iranian judicial sources without question, forgetting that these sources belong to a regime that lies by nature, a regime that sees its own people as expendable props in a global drama. The tragedy of collateral damage is real and profound. But the moral responsibility for it becomes horrifyingly complex when one side deliberately embeds its war machine within its civilian population. The strike wasn't random; its 'surgical precision' was in hitting its intended military target. The supreme horror is where that target was deliberately placed.

With these pillars shaken, the entire edifice of my worldview began to fail. I had always seen Israel as the primary escalator of violence. But the brief I reviewed, combined with a deeper look at the timeline, revealed a different pattern. It detailed how this massive operation, ‘Am Kelavi,’ was paired with a sophisticated campaign of deception and pre-emptive strikes on launch sites that, according to the analysis, crippled Iran’s planned retaliation by over 80%. It successfully deterred proxies like Hezbollah from opening a second front. I had been looking at the explosion, not the chain reaction it prevented. The argument, so alien to my previous thinking, was that this wasn't an act of escalation, but a brutal, high-stakes act of de-escalation. It was a limited war to prevent a catastrophic, multi-front, potentially nuclear one. It was a blow aimed at restoring deterrence, not shattering it.

My certainty about the ‘will of the Iranian people’ also evaporated. I had seen the state-managed funerals as definitive proof that the populace was unified against Israel. It was a naive assumption. How could I, a journalist who prided myself on skepticism, so readily accept the stagecraft of a totalitarian regime as authentic public sentiment? A world without the IRGC—the regime's primary tool of domestic oppression and foreign terror—is undeniably a better world, most of all for ordinary Iranians. The 'favor' Israel claimed to be doing was not about winning a popularity contest in Tehran this week. It was a long-term strategic calculation: that removing the head of the serpent was a necessary first step toward any future where the Iranian people might actually be free.

I do not have a new set of simple certainties to replace the old ones. This journey has not made me an apologist; it has made me a realist about the impossible choices leaders must make when faced with threats most of us cannot comprehend. The moral landscape is not the black-and-white tableau I once painted. It is a minefield of tragic choices, where the ‘least bad option’ can still feel, and look, horrific. My condemnation came so easily because my understanding was so simple. Now, that understanding is painfully complex, and I find that easy condemnation is a luxury I can no longer afford. My only conclusion is a humble one: we owe it to the truth to question the narratives that feel the most comfortable, to look for the detail that doesn't fit, and to ask, with genuine intellectual honesty: what if we’re wrong?