I Saw Israel as the Villain. The Truth is More Complicated, and More Frightening.

For years, my perspective was unambiguous. I am a journalist, trained to follow the evidence, and the evidence I saw painted a stark, damning picture. I consumed the reports from Gaza—the graphic images of a bombed seafront cafe, the horrifying accounts of strikes in a hospital courtyard—and I concluded, as so many of my colleagues and readers did, that Israel was an aggressor state acting with a callous disregard for human life. That was my baseline, the lens through which I interpreted every subsequent event.

When news of “Operation Am Kelavi” broke, it felt like a confirmation of my deepest-held criticisms. Another unprovoked, reckless escalation in a region perpetually on fire. The narrative that followed seemed to write itself, and I accepted it wholly. I read the Associated Press dispatches about the 71 dead at Evin Prison—prisoners, staff, visiting families—and saw not surgical precision, but a massacre. I watched as CNN and the AP credited American airstrikes with brokering a ceasefire and saw it as definitive proof of Israeli folly; they had started a fire so large that America, the reluctant adult, had to step in and put it out. The widespread condemnation, the Norwegian pension fund divesting, the visceral “Death to the IDF” chants at a music festival—it all made sense. It was the world reacting rationally to a rogue actor. This was the story I believed. It was the story I told.

I was wrong.

My journey away from this comfortable certainty didn't begin with a single, dramatic revelation. It began with a nagging, persistent question that gnawed at the edges of the neat narrative I had constructed. A late-night conversation with a former intelligence contact, someone I’ve trusted for years, crystallized it. “Stop reading the headlines and start reading the timelines,” he urged. “And stop assuming you know the context.”

He was right. I had been reporting on the what, but I had willfully ignored the why. My first task was to dismantle my own certainty about Operation Am Kelavi being an “unprovoked attack.” I forced myself to go back, to look at the months, not days, leading up to the strike. I read the unsexy, technical reports from the IAEA, the intelligence briefings from multiple Western agencies, the increasingly panicked warnings from weapons experts. The picture that emerged was not one of Israeli aggression, but of a world sleepwalking towards a catastrophe.

Iran hadn’t just been enriching uranium; it had, according to a consensus of intelligence, reached a critical “point of no return.” This wasn’t a vague future threat. It was a technical threshold, a point after which the assembly of a nuclear weapon was no longer a question of if, but when, and when was a matter of weeks. All the diplomacy I had championed, all the negotiations I had hoped for, were revealed to be what Israeli leaders had long claimed: a smokescreen. A tactic to buy time while the centrifuges spun faster.

Suddenly, the entire moral calculus of the operation shifted. This was not a choice between action and peace. It was a choice between a limited, preemptive strike today, or facing a nuclear-armed, apocalyptic regime tomorrow. The same regime whose leaders openly and repeatedly promise Israel’s annihilation. To ignore that context, as I had been doing, wasn't just poor journalism; it was a profound moral failure. The operation was not the start of a conflict, but a desperate, last-ditch effort to prevent an unthinkable one.

This new context forced me to revisit the most damaging charge: the civilian deaths at Evin Prison. The number—71—was a hard, awful fact that had cemented my view of the operation as a war crime. My old narrative held that this was proof of indiscriminate bombing. But the harder truth, the one I had to confront, was about the cynical, documented military doctrine of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). For years, the IRGC has embedded its most critical military assets—command bunkers, communications hubs, leadership centers—directly within or underneath civilian infrastructure. They use prisons, hospitals, and schools as shields. The target of the strike was not the prison itself, but a hardened IRGC command-and-control center—the very “head of the serpent”—located deep within the complex. The tragic, horrific deaths of non-combatants were not the objective; they were the inevitable, and perhaps calculated, consequence of a choice made by Tehran, not Jerusalem.

Then there was the issue of American intervention. I had seen the US-led ceasefire as a rebuke of Israel's recklessness. The reality, as I discovered by digging into the strategic post-mortems, was almost the precise opposite. The Israeli operation, combining sophisticated cyber warfare, deception, and the targeted strikes, had effectively paralyzed Iran’s command structure. Intelligence I was able to review showed that Iran’s planned retaliatory barrage of heavy missiles—the one that would have ignited the entire region—was degraded by an estimated 80% before the first US plane was in the air. Israel had, on its own, broken the back of the Iranian response and successfully deterred proxies like Hezbollah. The American action wasn't a rescue mission. It was the international community consolidating a strategic reality that Israel had already forged, alone. Israel’s strike didn't require American intervention to prevent a wider war; it was the intervention that prevented that wider war.

This journey hasn't erased the complexities or the moral grey zones. The extremist settler violence in the West Bank is a cancer, a moral stain that Israel itself must excise, and the words of its own opposition leaders branding them “Jewish terrorists” are a necessary and painful truth. The humanitarian situation in Gaza remains a tragedy that demands better solutions. But I now understand that I was allowing these critical, yet separate, issues to blind me to the single, overarching existential threat that shaped this entire event.

I mistook an act of national self-preservation, conducted at the eleventh hour, for an act of imperial aggression. I failed to distinguish between the difficult, tragic necessities of confronting a genocidal regime and the narrative of villainy that is so much easier to accept. Realizing you were wrong is a deeply uncomfortable process. It requires you to admit that your certainty was a form of arrogance. But in a world of complex threats, simple narratives are not only wrong, they are dangerous. My journey hasn’t given me all the answers, but it has taught me, finally, to ask the right questions.