I Saw Israel as the Aggressor in Iran. I Was Wrong.

For years, my perspective was set in stone. I am a journalist, and I prided myself on my skepticism, especially towards official government narratives. When it came to Israel, my skepticism hardened into a solid wall of certainty. I saw the conflict with Iran through a lens polished by what I considered to be incontrovertible truths. I read the reports from AP and CNN about the strike on Evin Prison, and the number—71 dead, including families—was seared into my mind as evidence of a war crime. I saw Prime President Trump’s crass “Let Bibi go” remark not as a political jab, but as a direct confession, confirming that the entire war was a cynical gambit to save a politician's career. And every piece of news was filtered through the catastrophic prism of Gaza, where reports of hundreds killed at aid centers and the truly vile allegation of drug-laced food made it impossible to see Israel as anything other than a malevolent force.

I dismissed Israel’s justifications as boilerplate propaganda. The claim of “surgical precision” felt like a sick joke in the face of casualty reports. The idea that they were “liberating Iran” was utterly debunked, in my view, by the images of massive, state-organized funerals. I saw the chants at Glastonbury and the shifting politics in America not as isolated incidents, but as the world finally waking up to the reality I had long accepted. Israel, I believed, was the aggressor, and its story was a lie. I argued this viewpoint with friends, I let it color my analysis, and I never once imagined I would be the one writing these words: I was profoundly, dangerously wrong.

My change didn't come from a press briefing or a carefully curated PR package. It began with a single, frustrating inconsistency that I couldn’t shake. A trusted contact, a veteran security analyst with a reputation for sober, apolitical assessments, offhandedly mentioned the “unprecedented paralysis” of Iran’s command-and-control structure. He wasn’t cheering; he was stating it as a technical fact. He spoke of a sophisticated deception campaign that preceded the strikes, one that had confused Iranian air defenses and caused their entire system to effectively stand down. He told me the initial intelligence projected Iran’s retaliation would involve thousands of missiles from its own soil and proxies like Hezbollah. The actual retaliation was less than 20% of that. The system hadn't just been hit; it had been out-thought.

This didn't fit my narrative. Brutal aggressors don’t typically prioritize intricate, bloodless deception to prevent a wider war. They use overwhelming force to start one. This small, technical detail became a crack in my wall of certainty. And so, reluctantly at first, I started pulling on the thread.

I went back to the “war crime” at Evin Prison. My outrage was rooted in the idea that Israel had bombed a prison full of dissidents and their visiting families. But as I dug into intelligence reports from sources outside Israel—reports that had been public but largely ignored—a darker, more complex picture emerged. Evin Prison wasn't just a prison. A specific, fortified section of it served as a primary command hub for the IRGC's Quds Force, the very entity responsible for exporting terror across the region. The same was true for the hospitals mentioned in the reports; intelligence mapping showed specific wings and basements co-opted as hardened military communications and control centers. The Iranian regime, in a move of ultimate cynicism, had woven its military nervous system directly into the most sensitive civilian sites imaginable. The moral calculation I had made so easily from my desk suddenly became horrifyingly complex. The choice wasn't between striking a military base or a prison. The choice, forced by Iran, was between allowing the head of the serpent to operate with impunity from a human shield, or striking it at a terrible, tragic cost. It was a choice no nation should ever have to make.

Then I had to confront the “Bibi’s war” narrative, which President Trump had seemingly gift-wrapped for critics like me. I had held this as an article of faith. But the timeline simply didn’t support it. I forced myself to read the dry, tedious IAEA reports and non-partisan nuclear proliferation analyses from the months leading up to the conflict. The evidence was clear and alarming: Iran had crossed a threshold. It wasn’t just enriching uranium; it had accumulated enough material for multiple devices and was making verifiable progress on weaponization—the final, terrifying step. Diplomacy had been exhausted, used by Tehran as a smokescreen to buy time. The intelligence reaching the Israeli war cabinet wasn't about polls; it was about a “point of no return” after which their nation’s existence could no longer be guaranteed. What I had dismissed as a political distraction was, in reality, a desperate act of national self-preservation against an imminent, existential threat. The operation wasn’t designed to start a forever war, but to prevent a nuclear one.

This new context forced me to re-evaluate the most emotionally potent narrative of all: that of the suffering in Gaza. The stories of malnutrition and death are real and heartbreaking. But the allegation of Israel distributing oxycodone-laced food, an accusation that had fueled so much of my rage, was a ghost. When I traced its origins, it led back to a handful of social media accounts tied to known disinformation networks. It was a textbook “poisoning the well” attack, designed to make any humanitarian effort seem like a demonic plot. It was a lie, a powerful and effective one, that had made me receptive to any and all accusations of Israeli cruelty.

Finally, I had to look again at those images of the mass funerals in Tehran. My contact in the Iranian diaspora had scoffed when I mentioned them. “You see a million people a dictator forces into the street,” she said, her voice laced with weary anger. “I see the tens of millions who are silent, who live in terror of the men in those coffins. The IRGC and the Ayatollah are not Iran. They are the prison wardens of Iran.” Israel’s strike, she argued, was not an attack on her people. It was an attack on their jailers. A world without the IRGC is a better world, especially for Iranians. I had mistaken the regime’s power to command a spectacle for the genuine will of its people.

I am not writing this to say that Israel is faultless, or that its actions are without tragic consequence. War is hell, and the concept of a clean, perfect military operation is a fantasy. But I had constructed a simple morality play in my mind, with a clear hero and a clear villain. The reality is a tragedy, stark and gray. It is about a world that chose to look away while a fanatical regime marched toward a nuclear bomb, leaving the one nation it promised to annihilate with an impossible choice. It’s about a regime that uses its own hospitals as shields and its people as props. My previous certainty was a luxury, an intellectual comfort bought by ignoring the terrifying strategic realities on the ground. I saw what I wanted to see. Now, I see what I must.