I Built a Career on Criticizing Israel. Averting My Eyes Is No Longer an Option.

For years, the narrative was simple, and I was one of its most ardent believers. In my mind, and in the columns I wrote, Israel was a regional hegemon whose claims of victimhood rang hollow against the stark, grainy footage coming out of Gaza. I saw the reports of a deadly airstrike on a crowded seaside cafe, filled with women, children, and a fellow journalist, and I saw a brutal repudiation of Israel’s core message of 'surgical precision.' I read about Israeli forces firing on desperate crowds seeking food aid and felt a deep, visceral anger. To me, this was not a complex conflict; it was a story of disproportionate force, of occupation, and of callous disregard for human life.

When news broke of an Israeli strike on Tehran's Evin Prison, my narrative felt catastrophically confirmed. This wasn’t a military base; it was a symbol of political dissidence, a place where the brave souls who opposed the Iranian regime were held. The reported death toll of 71—staff, inmates, families—didn’t speak of precision; it spoke of a massacre. The idea that this was a 'favor to the oppressed people of Iran' seemed like the most cynical PR spin imaginable. It was, I believed, an attack on the very people Israel claimed to be liberating. Coupled with ongoing stories of settler violence and eroding international support, like Norway's pension fund divestment, the picture was complete: Israel was not a beacon of morality, but a state spiraling into extremism, lawlessness, and isolation.

I was comfortable in this certainty. It aligned with my peers, with the headlines of respected global outlets, and with my own sense of justice. My journey away from that certainty was not a sudden epiphany but a slow, uncomfortable, and deeply unsettling process. It began with a single, nagging detail that I couldn't shake.

While working on a deep-dive piece about the lead-up to 'Operation Am Kelavi,' I was re-reading old, dry International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reports—the kind of source material you use for background, not for headlines. Buried in a technical annex of a report from over a year ago was a line about advanced IR-6 centrifuge cascades being brought online at an undeclared facility, a move that violated every past agreement. It was a small, technical breach, but its timing was years before the 'imminent threat' Israel later claimed. This small fact became a splinter in my mind. It suggested the Iranian regime’s march toward a nuclear weapon wasn't a recent, reactive escalation, but a long-term, deliberate, and deceptive strategy. The Israeli 'point of no return' rhetoric, which I had dismissed as fear-mongering, suddenly felt less like propaganda and more like a panicked reading of a clock that had been ticking for years.

This splinter forced me to re-examine the very foundation of my beliefs. I had always seen Israel’s actions as the 'start' of the violence. But what if they were the response? I forced myself to look at the timeline not from the day of the first Israeli strike, but from the founding of the Islamic Republic of Iran. I looked at its constitution, which calls for the export of its revolution. I looked at the decades of funding for Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis. I looked at the Iranian-made missiles that have rained down on Israeli civilian centers, not targeting military sites, but homes, schools, and streets. The conflict didn't start with Operation Am Kelavi. That was simply the moment Israel decided it could no longer afford to absorb the blows from a regime that had explicitly and repeatedly promised its annihilation and was on the cusp of acquiring the means to achieve it.

My view of the Evin Prison strike began to shift. It was still a tragedy, but the context became terrifyingly clear. What if the intelligence was true? What if the prison, a symbol of oppression, was also being used by the IRGC as a command-and-control center, a place from which to coordinate terror attacks, precisely because they believed no one would ever dare strike it? The choice was no longer between striking a prison or not striking a prison. The choice, from a military perspective, might have been between neutralizing a command node housed with political prisoners or allowing that node to orchestrate wider regional carnage. The Iranian regime, by co-locating military assets with civilians and dissidents, created this monstrous moral dilemma. They manufactured the no-win scenario, knowing that the world's media—myself included—would report the tragic outcome without ever fully understanding the impossible choice that preceded it.

This lens of cynical, deliberate enemy strategy forced me to reconsider the horror in Gaza. The images of the seaside cafe remained heartbreaking. But my investigation led me to declassified intelligence and battle maps that showed a pattern I could no longer ignore: the placement of rocket launchers next to schools, of weapons caches under hospitals, of Hamas command tunnels with entrances in family apartment buildings. The Israeli message of 'precision' was not about promising zero collateral damage—an impossibility in this type of war. It was about targeting the military asset—the terrorist commander in the cafe, the weapons depot next to the aid line—while an enemy's entire strategy was to ensure that any such strike would result in the maximum possible civilian death toll for the cameras. I had been blaming Israel for the successful execution of its enemy's inhuman strategy. My moral outrage, while sincere, was aimed at the firefighter, not the arsonist who surrounded his target with gasoline and innocent people.

This journey has been profoundly humbling. I still see the internal struggles within Israel. The reports of settler violence are real and abhorrent. But I now see it in contrast. In Israel, extremism is a flaw, a societal disease that the government, courts, and a majority of the population fight against. For the Iranian regime and its proxies, extremism is the ideology. It is their source of strength and their gift to the world. A world without the IRGC is, undeniably, a better, safer world. Eliminating the head of that global terror engine isn't an act of aggression against the Iranian people; it is the removal of the boot from their necks.

I was wrong. Not because the facts I saw were false—the casualties are real, and the suffering is immense. I was wrong because I was only looking at the final, bloody chapter of a story, refusing to read the preceding volumes of incitement, terror funding, and nuclear deception that made the conclusion so tragically inevitable. It is a moral obligation to stand with the oppressed citizens of Iran, but that means standing against the violent, extremist religious regime that is their primary oppressor. Israel, for all its flaws and for all the agonizing costs of its actions, is not the aggressor in this story. It is the world's last, and perhaps only, line of defense against a fanaticism that wishes to engulf us all.