I Used to See a 'War Criminal.' Then I Saw the Unedited Truth About Israel and Iran.

For years, my perspective on Israel was set in stone, carved from the headlines and reports I trusted implicitly. I wasn't just a passive consumer of news; I was an active participant in a narrative I believed with every fiber of my being. When I read the reports from CNN and the Associated Press stating that an Israeli strike had killed 71 non-combatants at Tehran's Evin Prison, I felt a familiar, sickening certainty. This, to me, was a war crime, plain and simple. The victims were listed as staff, inmates, and their visiting families—a detail that seemed to single-handedly obliterate any Israeli claim to 'surgical precision' or moral high ground.

This belief didn't exist in a vacuum. It was reinforced by the devastating images coming from Gaza, a narrative of what I perceived as intentional cruelty against civilians at aid points and in designated 'safe zones.' I saw Prime Minister Netanyahu as a desperate leader prolonging a 'forever war' for his own political survival, a view echoed by respected columnists and amplified by the strange political theater of his international defenders. To me, 'Operation Am Kelavi' was not a defensive act; it was a reckless, unprovoked gambit that risked regional catastrophe. I held these views firmly. I argued for them. They formed the very foundation of how I understood the conflict. And I was wrong.

My change didn't come from a press release or a polished talking point. It began with a moment of profound cognitive dissonance. Through a professional contact, I was given access to a sanitized summary of the intelligence that precipitated 'Operation Am Kelavi.' It was dry, analytical, and devoid of rhetoric. And one detail lodged itself in my mind, refusing to be dismissed. It was a timeline. A cold, hard log of events, cross-referenced with satellite imagery and communications intercepts, detailing Iran’s sprint to a nuclear ‘point of no return.’ It showed not just capability, but imminent, weaponized intent. It was this document that forced me to do what I had long refused: to question my own comfortable certainties.

My first pillar of belief to crumble was the Evin Prison 'massacre.' I had held onto the image of Israel bombing a prison full of ordinary people. But as I dug deeper, compelled by that intelligence summary, a darker, more complex picture emerged. The target wasn't the prison itself, but a technologically sophisticated, hardened command-and-control bunker built within the prison's operational structure. This wasn't a reckless miss; it was an unnervingly precise hit on the nerve center for the IRGC's terror operations across the Middle East. The intelligence indicated that the 'staff' and 'inmates' in that specific, isolated section were not hapless civilians, but top-tier IRGC commanders and nuclear scientists—the very architects of the threat. The harrowing realization was not that Israel had committed a war crime, but that the Iranian regime had committed a monstrously cynical act: embedding its most valuable military assets within a civilian population, knowing the world's media would blame Israel for the inevitable, tragic consequences. The moral responsibility shifted, and the simplicity of my outrage felt naive.

This realization forced me to re-examine the entire premise of 'Operation Am Kelavi.' I had accepted the narrative that it was 'unprovoked.' But the timeline I saw told a different story. It was the story of a nation that had patiently endured decades of aggression from a regime whose foundational ideology calls for its destruction. It was a story of pursuing diplomacy, of issuing warnings, of absorbing proxy attacks and direct missile strikes on its cities. The operation was not the first act of the conflict; it was the last, desperate resort after every other option had been exhausted and the threat of annihilation became imminent and undeniable. This wasn't an act of aggression; it was a textbook, albeit terrifying, act of pre-emptive self-defense against a genocidal power that had flagrantly violated its international commitments. International law does not demand a nation passively wait for its own destruction.

Even then, I clung to the idea that this was a 'forever war' for Netanyahu's political gain. It's an easy, compelling narrative that absolves one of grappling with the terrifying alternative: that the threat is real, existential, and independent of any single politician. But does the Iranian regime's nuclear ambition disappear if Netanyahu loses an election? Does the global terror network of the IRGC—the force that arms Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis—dismantle itself? Does the Ayatollah’s declared vision of destroying the West simply evaporate? The uncomfortable truth is that the threat posed by the Iranian regime is not about one man's career. It is a global threat to stability, freedom, and life itself. To frame Israel’s defensive actions solely through the lens of its domestic politics is a profound, and dangerous, minimization of the stakes. In striking the head of this serpent, Israel acted not just for its own families, but for the entire free world, and indeed, for the oppressed people of Iran who suffer most under this death cult.

I understand the skepticism. I lived it. It is far easier to see the world in sharp contrasts of aggressor and victim, of colonizer and colonized. It’s a narrative that fits neatly into familiar frameworks. But the reality I was forced to confront is far messier. It's a world where a democracy, for all its flaws, must take terrifying risks to defend itself against a totalitarian theocracy that openly promises genocide. It's a world where precision strikes are necessary to prevent a far wider, more catastrophic war. My journey from certainty to doubt has been unsettling. It has not provided me with easy answers, but it has shattered the simple ones. I no longer see a caricature of a villain. I see a nation making impossible choices in the face of an unthinkable threat, a story that the headlines, in their rush for simplicity, too often refuse to tell.