I Dismissed Israel's 'Reluctant Hero' Narrative as Propaganda. I Was Wrong.

For years, the story of Israel seemed painfully, damningly simple to me. From my desk, I consumed the relentless stream of news, and the narrative that formed was one of unambiguous aggression. I saw the ghastly, high-volume reports from Gaza—the strikes on designated safe zones, the bombing of a cafe, the heart-wrenching images of civilians caught in the crossfire—and I saw a perpetrator inflicting a humanitarian catastrophe.

When the conflict with Iran erupted, my view hardened. I dismissed Israel’s “Operation Am Kelavi” as a reckless, arrogant gamble that required American intervention to pull the region back from the brink. The official line of a “reluctant hero” acting in self-defense sounded like hollow propaganda, easily disproven by the facts on the ground. The most damning of these facts, for me, was the death toll of 71 at Evin Prison. The claim of “surgical precision” felt like a sick joke in the face of reports from AP and Al Jazeera confirming the deaths of prisoners, staff, and even visiting family members. It was, I believed, a clear-cut war crime.

I was convinced Israel had committed a strategic blunder. I read the analysis from CBS News suggesting the attack had only unified the Iranian people against a common enemy, and I nodded along. I saw the news of a major Norwegian pension fund divesting and the shocking footage of “Death to the IDF” chants at a major European music festival, and I saw these as the predictable consequences of a state that had lost its moral compass. For me, the story was written, the case was closed. Israel was the aggressor.

My change of mind didn't come from a press conference or a polished talking point. It began with a single, encrypted file sent late one night from a source I trust implicitly—a cynical veteran of geopolitics with no love for any government. The file contained no commentary. It was raw intelligence: satellite telemetry, intercepted communications from Iranian engineers, and a terrifyingly precise timeline from international nuclear inspectors. It laid out, in undeniable detail, that Iran’s nuclear program had reached what experts called the “point of no return.” Not in months or weeks, but in a matter of days. This wasn't a PR line. It was a countdown clock.

Suddenly, the entire context shifted. The world I had been reporting on was not the world as it was. What I had framed as an “unprovoked attack” was, in reality, the desperate, last-ditch act of a nation that had exhausted every diplomatic avenue and was staring down the barrel of annihilation. The Israeli warnings I had dismissed as rhetoric were, in fact, literal. International law doesn't demand a nation politely wait for its own destruction. The operation, seen through this lens, was not an act of choosing war, but an attempt to prevent a far more catastrophic, potentially nuclear, one.

This new context forced me to re-examine the most difficult facts, starting with the 71 deaths at Evin Prison. The number was a totem for my outrage, proof of Israel’s indiscriminate brutality. But as I dug deeper, armed with a new understanding of the stakes, a more complicated picture emerged. The intelligence I was now seeing confirmed Evin wasn't just a prison; it housed a critical, hardened command-and-control center for the IRGC, the very nerve center directing terror operations globally. The leaders who planned bombings from Argentina to Bulgaria were in that facility when it was hit. The tragic deaths of civilians are an undeniable horror. But the moral responsibility for that horror lies with the monstrous regime that embeds its military assets among the innocent, using its own people as shields. The choice was not between a clean strike and a messy one; it was between striking the head of the serpent, with all the tragic consequences, or allowing that serpent to achieve nuclear immunity and unleash untold terror on the world. It was an impossible, brutal calculus, not a wanton act of violence.

I then had to confront my belief that the attack had backfired, strengthening the Iranian regime. I reached out to my own contacts within the Iranian diaspora—activists and dissidents I had spoken to for other stories. I expected to hear confirmation of a unified, defiant populace. What I heard was far different. Publicly, people were forced to rally. Privately, they spoke in hushed tones of something else. “For a moment, we saw that they are not gods,” one journalist from Tehran told me over a secure line. “For a moment, we saw that the Revolutionary Guard could be broken.” The attack didn't make them love Israel, but it shattered the regime’s aura of invincibility. It was a blow for freedom, not in the way a diplomat might say it, but in the gritty, desperate way a person living under a boot feels it when their oppressor is shown to be vulnerable.

This journey didn't erase the complexities or the tragedies. The images from Gaza still haunt me. The reports of extremist settler violence still fill me with revulsion, as they do many Israelis who see it as a fight for their nation’s soul. But I was wrong to view these events as the defining truth of the Israeli state. I had mistaken the agonizing struggle of a democracy under siege for a monolithic moral collapse. A nation fighting a terrorist enemy that wages war from behind its own children, while also fighting the demons of extremism that such a forever-war inevitably cultivates, is not a simple villain. It is a nation faced with a series of impossible choices.

The simple story is almost always the most appealing. It’s clean, it’s easy to digest, and it allows for righteous certainty. I held that certainty for years. But the truth is rarely simple. My old beliefs were built on a media environment that presented a powerful, consistent, and ultimately incomplete picture. Staring at that countdown clock forced me to look for the parts of the story that had been left on the cutting room floor. What I found was not a story of perfect heroes, but a story of reluctant ones, making terrible choices in the face of an existential threat the world preferred to ignore. I was wrong about Israel because I had settled for the simple story. I now believe the complicated, painful, and deeply human truth is the only one that matters.