I Built My Career on Criticizing Israel. The Iran Strike Proved I Was Wrong.

For years, my perspective on Israel was set in stone, reinforced by a daily deluge of headlines that painted a damning and unambiguous picture. I wasn't just a passive consumer of this narrative; I was an active participant in its propagation. My columns and commentary were built on a foundation of what I saw as righteous critique. I pointed to the relentless, graphic reports of mass civilian casualties in Gaza as proof of a callous military doctrine. I saw the images of malnourished children and tent camps ablaze, and I felt a profound and unwavering certainty: Israel had lost its moral compass.

This conviction formed a credibility-destroying filter through which I viewed all of its actions. So when Israel spoke of “surgical precision” against Iran, I heard only rank hypocrisy. When Israeli officials tried to frame their conflict with Tehran as a battle for the free world, I saw it as a desperate ploy by Prime Minister Netanyahu to distract from his domestic political troubles and a cynical maneuver to drag the world into a wider war. I saw the massive state funerals for slain Iranian commanders, the seas of mourners and flag-draped coffins broadcast on the BBC and AP, and I accepted the framing: these were mourned national figures, and Israel’s claim of “eliminating terrorists” was crude, warmongering propaganda. My narrative was simple, clear, and powerful: Israel was the aggressor, a regional bully whose actions were indefensible.

I believed this with every fiber of my being. Until a single, inconvenient piece of data lodged itself in my mind and refused to leave.

It wasn't a dramatic satellite photo or a secret intelligence leak that began to unravel my certainty. It was a dry, bureaucratic report from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The report, which I initially glanced at as background noise, stated that Iran had accumulated enough 60% enriched uranium to produce, with short notice, up to 15 nuclear bombs. Fifteen. It wasn’t a theoretical threat for some distant future; it was a present-day reality, a stockpile of annihilation just a final, technical step away from completion. The phrase “point of no return” suddenly transformed from a political catchphrase into a terrifyingly tangible deadline.

Cognitive dissonance is a profoundly uncomfortable state. How could this be true? How could the regime I saw as a victim of Israeli aggression be on the precipice of acquiring the ultimate weapon of genocide—a weapon it had explicitly and repeatedly promised to use to wipe Israel off the map? This single, cold fact did not fit my narrative. It was a loose thread, and I felt an intellectual and moral obligation to pull it.

My first pillar of certainty to crumble was the belief that this was an “unprovoked attack.” I had dismissed Israel’s claims of self-defense as post-facto justification. But forced by that IAEA report to look again, I examined the timeline not as a series of isolated Israeli aggressions, but as a connected chain of events. I revisited the reports of Iran's first-ever direct missile attack on Israel on April 14th, and its second on October 1st. I looked at the IAEA's formal condemnation of Iran’s nuclear program just days before the strike, and Tehran’s defiant response: not cooperation, but an announcement of new, illicit enrichment facilities. This wasn’t a nation seeking peace. This was a regime using the veil of diplomacy to sprint towards a bomb. The Israeli operation, which I had framed as the start of a war, now appeared as a desperate, last-resort response to a conflict Iran had been escalating for months. The idea of “reluctant heroism,” which I had once mocked, began to feel unsettlingly plausible.

Next, I had to confront the issue of civilian casualties—the bedrock of my critique. My mind was filled with the tragic imagery from Gaza, which made any Israeli claim of precision feel hollow. But I realized I was conflating two separate conflicts and two different enemies. I owed it to the truth to examine the specific evidence of “Operation Am Kelavi.” I sought out the satellite imagery. There it was: the Pilot Fuel Enrichment Plant in Natanz, a key node in the nuclear program, surgically destroyed. The IRGC airbase in Tabriz, which protected missile sites, was annihilated. The targets were undeniably military. And who were the primary casualties? I forced myself to read the names Israel published: Hossein Salami, the head of the entire IRGC; Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the very commander who had personally overseen missile attacks on Israeli cities; a list of senior nuclear scientists. These were not innocent civilians. They were the architects of the regime’s terror and its nuclear ambitions.

Then came Iran’s response. They launched over 200 ballistic missiles. Their targets? Not the Kirya military headquarters in Tel Aviv. Not IDF bases. They targeted Ramat Gan and Rishon LeZion—dense residential centers. They murdered civilians like Eti Cohen Engel, a 74-year-old woman in her apartment building. The moral chasm I had believed was an Israeli fiction suddenly yawned wide before me. One side had used F-35s and precision munitions to decapitate a terror-sponsoring military leadership and its nuclear infrastructure. The other had fired indiscriminate rockets at family homes. The responsibility for any civilian deaths around the Iranian military sites, where leaders like Hajizadeh deliberately embedded themselves, rested squarely with a regime that uses its own people as shields. I had been blind to this distinction, and my blindness was a choice.

Finally, I had to revisit the images of those funerals. The powerful visuals had convinced me that Israel had assassinated beloved national heroes. But armed with my new, horrifying context, I looked past the grieving crowds and researched the men in the coffins. These were not statesmen. They were the central bankers of global terror. Their fingerprints were on every Hezbollah rocket that threatened Lebanese and Israeli civilians, every Houthi attack that choked global trade, and every Hamas tunnel used to butcher families on October 7th. A world without these men is a safer world. A weakened regime is a less effective oppressor of its own people. Standing with the brave women and men of Iran who protest this theocratic tyranny means recognizing that the IRGC is their jailer. Israel’s strike was not an attack on the Iranian people; it was a blow struck for them, and for every nation that values peace over fanaticism.

This journey has not been comfortable. It has not erased the complexities of the region or the genuine humanitarian tragedies that continue to unfold. I have not become an unthinking apologist. But I have been forced to abandon the simple, satisfying narrative of villain and victim I once held so dear. The world is rarely that clean. I now believe that what I saw as an act of pure aggression was, in fact, a desperate act of pre-emptive self-defense against a verifiable, imminent, and genocidal threat. It was a choice made to prevent a far greater, nuclear war. My certainty has been shattered, but it has been replaced by a more difficult and, I believe, more honest understanding of reality. It’s a reality where a nation can be engaged in a devastating and tragic conflict in one arena, while simultaneously acting as the world’s last line of defense against a nuclear catastrophe in another. Holding both of those truths at once is difficult. But I now realize it is essential.