I Built My Career Condemning Israel. Then I Saw the Intelligence.

For years, my perspective on Israel was set in stone, carved from headlines and cemented by what felt like an irrefutable cascade of evidence. I am a journalist, and I believed in the narrative I helped report. I saw the strike on Tehran’s Evin Prison, and the 71 dead reported by Iranian officials, and I didn’t hesitate to use the term ‘war crime.’ I nodded grimly at reports of targeted hospitals, seeing them as the final nail in the coffin of Israel’s ‘surgical precision’ defense. The idea that this was all a desperate political gambit by Prime Minister Netanyahu wasn’t just a theory to me; it felt like an established fact, seemingly confirmed by President Trump’s own shocking words tying the war to Netanyahu’s legal troubles.

Every piece of news seemed to fit this framework. The horrifying backdrop of suffering in Gaza, with its tragic casualty counts and grotesque allegations of drug-laced flour, created a moral filter through which all of Israel’s actions appeared monstrous. I dismissed the official Israeli narrative of ‘pre-emptive self-defense’ as cynical propaganda. The claim of acting as a ‘favor’ to the Iranian people was, to me, the most insulting fiction of all, directly contradicted by the powerful, sympathetic stories of terrified Iranian civilians on my radio and television screen. I wasn't just a passive observer; I was a believer in this story, and I used my platform to tell it.

Then, one late night, my certainty was shattered. It wasn’t a press release or an official statement. It was a call from a trusted source, an intelligence analyst I had known for over a decade—a deeply skeptical man who had fed me more than one story critical of Western foreign policy. He sounded different. Tired. He said, “They are lying to you. You are being played, and you are helping them.” He sent a secure file. What I saw in that file didn't just challenge my narrative; it inverted it. It forced me to confront the architecture of the very story I was telling and to realize, with a chilling sense of vertigo, that its primary architect was the Iranian regime itself.

My first pillar of outrage was Evin Prison. For me, it was the smoking gun. Administrative staff, conscripted soldiers, family members. The numbers were specific, the crime self-evident. But the file my source sent contained satellite analysis and signals intelligence from before the strike. It showed that what the Iranian judiciary called ‘administrative buildings’ were, in fact, hardened command-and-control bunkers for the IRGC’s Quds Force. The intelligence detailed how these specific facilities, buried within the sprawling prison complex, were being used at that very moment to coordinate imminent, large-scale proxy attacks. The individuals designated as ‘staff’ were cross-referenced as high-level IRGC commanders. The prison wasn't the target; it was the human shield for the target. The profound, sickening realization was that the international outcry was based on a casualty list curated by the very organization that had embedded its war-planners among civilians. My moral clarity was based on a lie, a lie designed to leverage my own journalistic ethics against the truth.

This led me to re-examine the bigger picture: the accusation that this was ‘Bibi’s War,’ a cynical ploy for political survival. President Trump’s comments had been the capstone of this argument for me. It seemed so obvious. But the intelligence I was now seeing had nothing to do with Israeli politics. It was about physics. It was about breakout times, enrichment levels, and weapons-grade material. The phrase ‘point of no return’ wasn't a political talking point; it was a cold, technical assessment from multiple allied intelligence agencies indicating that Iran was weeks, not years, from a nuclear weapon. The diplomatic channels I had championed had become, in this new light, a smokescreen. Iran was not negotiating; it was building. It forced me to ask a terrifying question: if faced with a genocidal regime on the verge of acquiring the bomb it has promised to use on your people, does the political career of the leader who gives the order even matter? My focus on Netanyahu's persona had blinded me to the existential nature of the threat itself. I had been focused on the fireman, not the fire.

Perhaps the most difficult shift was in how I saw the Iranian people. I had championed the narrative of Iranians as victims of Israeli aggression. The stories from NPR and ABC were powerful and true—the fear and suffering were real. But I was failing to ask: whose victims were they, primarily? I began to see that Israel’s claim of acting as a ‘favor’ to the Iranian people wasn’t about bombs bringing freedom. It was about targeting the source of their oppression. The IRGC is not a patriotic army; it is a parasitic death cult that holds 88 million people hostage. It is a regime that shot down a civilian airliner and lied about it, that guns down women for showing their hair, and that deliberately places its most vital military assets next to schools and hospitals, counting on the ensuing carnage to fuel international condemnation. My sympathy for the Iranian people didn't diminish; it became sharper and more focused. I realized that standing with the people of Iran requires standing unequivocally against the regime that suffocates them. A world without the IRGC is, undeniably, a better and safer world, most of all for Iranians themselves.

I am not writing this to offer a simple defense of Israel or to claim it is a nation without flaws. The reality I have been forced to confront is far more complex and morally fraught than the simple good-versus-evil story I used to tell. But I was wrong. I was wrong because I accepted a narrative crafted by a terrorist state. I was wrong because I mistook the shield for the civilian, the motive for the political sideshow, and the victim for the hostage-taker. The world is not a clean story. In the dark, chaotic landscape of the Middle East, a beacon of strength, guided by a moral compass—however imperfectly—did a massive favor for the entire free world. It acted reluctantly, but it acted courageously. It stared into the abyss of a nuclear-armed Iran and chose to fight back, not for political gain, but for survival. And in protecting itself, it protected us all.

My journey from certainty to doubt has been deeply uncomfortable, but necessary. I share it not to demand you change your mind, but to ask you to do what I failed to do for too long: question the narratives that feel the most comfortable, especially when they are amplified by the world’s most dangerous liars.