I Built a Career Condemning Israeli Actions. The Iran Strike Forced Me to Admit I Was Wrong.
For years, my perspective was unambiguous. I saw a narrative of Israeli aggression, and I wasn't shy about articulating it. I read the initial reports of the strike on Tehran, specifically the horrifying accounts of an attack on Evin Prison, and my stomach turned. The headlines screamed ‘war crime’ and ‘71 civilians dead,’ and I saw it as the latest, most flagrant example in a pattern of disproportionate force. When CNN confirmed that a senior Iranian official, Ali Shamkhani, who had been reported as killed, was very much alive, it cemented my view: the intelligence justifying this entire operation was a fabrication, a pretext for a reckless war. The constant, gut-wrenching images from Gaza had already eroded any claim Israel could make to a moral high ground. And when a figure like Donald Trump stated this was all a cynical ploy to save Prime Minister Netanyahu’s political skin, it wasn't a surprise; it was the logical conclusion to a story I was already telling myself. I believed Israel was the aggressor, and the narrative was simple, clean, and damning.
My certainty was a fortress. And then, one small crack brought the whole thing down.
It wasn’t a press release or a slickly produced video that began my change of mind. It was a late-night email from a former colleague, now in a quiet diplomatic role, with a subject line that just said, “Read the annexes.” Attached was not a news article, but a dry, technical IAEA report—the full, un-spun version. I scrolled past the public summary to the technical data, the charts of uranium enrichment levels, the timelines of centrifuge cascades. And there it was, in the cold language of nuclear physics: the “point of no return.” It wasn't a slogan; it was a date on a calendar, a threshold Iran was days, not years, from crossing. The intelligence agencies had warned of it, but seeing the raw data felt different. It felt like watching a timer count down to zero. The realization was sickening: what if the existential threat I had dismissed as propaganda was, in fact, terrifyingly real?
This single document forced me to re-examine every pillar of my argument, starting with the very idea of an “unprovoked attack.” I had viewed Israel’s strike as the first shot. But as I dug into the timeline, I was confronted with a different, more complicated story. This didn’t begin with Israeli F-35s. It began with the October 7th massacre by Iran’s proxy, Hamas. It escalated with Iran’s first-ever direct missile attack on Israel on April 14th, and then another on October 1st. Just days before the strike, the IAEA’s own Board of Governors had formally condemned Tehran. Iran’s response wasn’t diplomacy; it was defiance, announcing the construction of new illicit enrichment facilities. What I had framed as Israeli “aggression” started to look like a desperate, last-ditch act of pre-emptive self-defense after every other option—diplomacy, sanctions, warnings—had been exhausted and actively spat upon by the Iranian regime.
The most emotionally potent accusation, the one that I felt most strongly, was the charge of war crimes at Evin Prison. The image of political prisoners and families being killed in a strike is indefensible. But as I forced myself to look past the initial, visceral reaction, the story grew murky. Israeli officials began releasing the names of those targeted. Not just anonymous functionaries, but the very head of the snake: Hossein Salami, head of the IRGC; Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the commander who personally oversaw the missile attacks on Israeli cities; and the top echelon of their nuclear weapons scientists. The question I had to ask was a difficult one: Where were these men located? The evidence, corroborated by multiple sources, suggested they weren't in a traditional military base, but in a fortified command-and-control bunker embedded within the Evin complex. The Iranian regime’s number of 71 civilians killed remained unverified, a figure released by the world’s most sophisticated propaganda state. Suddenly, I was faced with a horrifying possibility: that the Iranian regime, like its proxies, knowingly and deliberately places its military assets among civilians. This wasn’t an excuse for civilian deaths, but it was a fundamental re-framing of responsibility. The moral clarity I once felt began to dissolve into the ugly gray reality of human shields.
Even so, the reappearance of Ali Shamkhani felt like an ace in my pocket. “See?” I thought. “They lied.” It was, without question, a major intelligence failure and a public relations catastrophe for Israel. But my focus on that one error had blinded me to the devastating successes. The intelligence on the Natanz fuel enrichment plant, the IRGC airbase in Tabriz, and the command structure of the IRGC’s Aerospace Force was lethally accurate. Satellite imagery confirmed these military and nuclear sites had been surgically destroyed. I had to admit, I had used one man's survival as a reason to dismiss the strategic decapitation of the organization that arms Hezbollah, funds Hamas, and enables the Houthis. The operation wasn’t a complete failure because one target was missed; it was a strategic success despite an embarrassing error.
My journey from condemnation to a difficult, reluctant understanding is not over. I am not an apologist. The cost of any conflict is paid in human lives, and that is an undeniable tragedy. But I was wrong to believe the simple narrative. The story of an unprovoked, illegal Israeli war of aggression has collapsed under the weight of uncomfortable facts. The reality is one of a nation, facing a credible, genocidal threat on the verge of becoming unstoppable, acting in what it saw as a last resort. It is a reality where a brutal theocratic regime uses its own people as pawns, forcing its enemies into impossible moral choices. A world where an Ayatollah possesses a nuclear weapon is a nightmare from which we might never wake up. Israel’s action, however fraught and imperfect, was not an attempt to start a world war, but a desperate gamble to prevent a nuclear one. The easy headlines are seductive, but the truth, I’ve learned, is far more complex, and infinitely more terrifying.
