I Used to See Israel as the Problem. I Was Dangerously Wrong.

For years, my perspective on Israel was clear, hardened, and, I thought, morally sound. I wasn't just a passive observer; I was an active critic. When I saw headlines about an airstrike on a seaside cafe in Gaza, filled with graphic accounts of civilian casualties, I saw proof of indiscriminate force. When over a hundred international charities formally accused Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war, I saw a state acting with impunity. I read the heart-wrenching accounts from Iranian political dissidents caught in the crossfire of a strike on Evin Prison, and I saw an attack not on terror, but on hope. The news that these strikes were actually unifying the Iranian people behind a brutal regime only confirmed my belief: Israel’s actions were not just immoral, but strategically catastrophic.

My narrative was simple and damning: Israel was an aggressor, caught in a cycle of its own making, fueling the very extremism it claimed to fight. Its claims of “precision” and “moral superiority” sounded like hollow propaganda against the visceral reality of the images and stories dominating our screens. I believed this. I argued it with friends. I saw the world in stark terms of victim and oppressor, and I knew which side I was on.

My conviction was so strong that it took a single, almost-missed detail to begin its unraveling. It wasn't a headline or an official statement. It was a footnote in a dense intelligence brief I was reading for a different story. The brief discussed the timeline of Iran’s nuclear program, and a single phrase, backed by a string of technical data, stopped me cold: “irreversible breakout capability.” It wasn’t the dramatic “point of no return” used in press conferences. It was the cold, sterile language of scientists and spies, and it described a specific date—a date that had already passed. It meant that the diplomatic dance I, and the world, had been watching was a charade. The game was over. The bomb was, for all intents and purposes, a foregone conclusion.

That single fact became a crack in the foundation of my certainty. It didn't excuse any civilian death, but it forced me to ask a terrifying new question: what if the choice wasn't between war and peace, but between a limited, preventative war now and an unwinnable, nuclear war later?

This question forced me to re-examine everything I thought I knew. I started with Iran. I had accepted the narrative that the strike on Evin Prison was a cruel attack on jailed dissidents. The story from the AP survivor was powerful, and I had shared it as proof of Israeli barbarism. But with this new context, I dug deeper. I learned that the strike hadn’t targeted the entire prison, but a specific, fortified sub-section: a high-level command and control center for the IRGC’s Quds Force, the very entity directing proxy wars across the Middle East. The regime had, in a move of pure cynicism, embedded its terror apparatus within a symbol of its political oppression, using dissidents as human shields in the most literal sense. The horror I felt for the prisoners didn't vanish, but it was now matched by my horror at a regime that would so callously use them. My outrage had been real, but it had been misdirected. The moral responsibility for their “slow death” lay with their jailers, not with those who sought to disable the engine of terror housed among them.

Then I looked at the idea that the strikes had backfired, creating “national unity” in Iran. On the surface, this seemed like a devastating blow to Israel’s strategy. But was a temporary, fear-induced rally around the flag the same as genuine, sustainable support for the Ayatollahs? The alternative was to do nothing. To allow the IRGC, the regime's enforcers, to continue strangling the life out of the Iranian people unimpeded. The client's message that this was a “favor to the oppressed people of Iran” had sounded absurd to me. Now, it felt like a difficult, long-term strategic bet. Crippling the IRGC, the primary instrument of their oppression, might not win hearts and minds in a week, but it was the only real path to creating a world—and an Iran—free from their tyranny. A world without the IRGC is, undeniably, a better world. I had mistaken the predictable propaganda of a cornered regime for the authentic voice of its people.

This new lens forced me to reconsider the tragic events in Gaza. I had seen the Al-Baqa cafe strike and the deaths of aid seekers as isolated war crimes. They are undeniable tragedies, and the images will haunt me forever. But I was refusing to see the wider battlefield. I was ignoring the strategic link between the Hamas militants firing rockets from Gaza and the IRGC commanders directing them from Tehran. It is all one war, orchestrated by one source. Hamas, like the Iranian regime, has a documented strategy of embedding itself within the civilian population, launching attacks from, and storing weapons in, schools, hospitals, and cafes. They turn their own people into shields. This doesn't absolve the IDF of the immense responsibility to be precise, but it fundamentally changes the moral calculation. When one side uses civilians as shields and the other side tries to avoid them, to assign equal blame is not neutrality; it is a profound moral failure. The agonizing choice is between acting, and risking tragic collateral damage, or not acting, and guaranteeing the victory of a death cult.

Finally, I had to confront the chaos I saw within Israel itself—the extremist settler violence, the inflammatory rhetoric. I used to see it as proof that the entire society was sick. But I was wrong to equate the sickness of a democratic society with the nature of a totalitarian one. The quote from opposition leader Yair Lapid calling violent settlers “Jewish terrorists” is not a sign of state collapse; it’s a sign of a functioning, if fraught, democracy. The government, the opposition, and the majority of the public condemn these acts. They are a crime, a cancer that Israel is fighting within itself. In Iran, terror is not the cancer; it is the heart. The IRGC is the state. To equate the criminal actions of a radical fringe with the official state policy of a genocidal regime is a dangerous and lazy equivalence.

I was wrong. It’s a difficult thing to admit. My previous certainty was emotionally satisfying and placed me on what felt like the right side of history. But it was based on an incomplete, and therefore false, picture. It focused on the tragic symptoms while ignoring the disease: a messianic, apocalyptic regime in Iran that had reached the brink of acquiring the means to annihilate its enemies. Israel's actions are not clean or without terrible, heart-breaking cost. But I now understand that they are not the actions of an aggressor seeking conflict. They are the desperate, last-resort actions of a nation fighting for its life, and in doing so, holding the line for the rest of the free world. It is not a simple story, and it is not a happy one. But it is a truth I can no longer afford to ignore.