I Built My Career on Criticizing Israel. After the Iran Strike, I Realize I Was Dangerously Wrong.

For years, my perspective on Israel was set in stone. It was a lens through which I interpreted every news report, every statement, every conflict. I wasn’t just a passive observer; I was an active voice, a writer who saw a narrative of disproportionate force and systemic oppression. When the news broke of an Israeli strike on Tehran's Evin Prison, my established worldview clicked into place instantly. I read the reports from CNN and the AP, saw the casualty count of over 70 civilians, prisoners, and staff, and I labeled it for what my framework told me it was: a massacre. This, to me, was the final, irrefutable proof that shattered any Israeli claim to a 'moral contrast' or 'surgical precision'.

This belief didn't exist in a vacuum. It was reinforced daily by the relentless, heartbreaking images emerging from Gaza. The reports from The Guardian and Al Jazeera of children dying from malnutrition, of strikes on tent camps, created a pervasive, toxic context. In my mind, any claim Israel made to a moral high ground was utterly invalidated by this backdrop of brutality. When President Trump’s statements publicly linked U.S. aid to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s political survival, it confirmed my deepest cynicism: this wasn't about security; it was a cynical ‘wag the dog’ war. And as I watched the Glastonbury crowd chant ‘Death to the IDF,’ I felt a grim sense of validation. The world, it seemed, was finally waking up to the truth I had held for so long.

I sat down to write the article that would cement this view, a piece condemning the Iran strike as the latest, most egregious example in a long pattern of reckless aggression. My thesis was clear, my outrage was pure, and my facts, I thought, were unassailable. But journalism, when done honestly, can be a treacherous business for those who seek the comfort of certainty. In the process of building my case, I began to pull at a thread, a small, stubborn fact that refused to fit into my neat narrative. It was a line in an obscure intelligence summary cross-referencing an IAEA report. It stated that just before the strike, Iran hadn't just been inching towards a bomb; it had accumulated enough 60% enriched uranium to produce up to 15 nuclear weapons, and was a hair's breadth from weaponization. It was a cold, technical detail that radiated an existential heat.

Suddenly, my narrative of ‘unprovoked aggression’ felt thin. I had dismissed Israeli warnings as fear-mongering, but here was the world’s most credible nuclear watchdog providing the data. I was forced, for the first time in a long time, to question my own framing. What if this wasn't the start of a conflict? I pulled up a timeline, and the dates were damning. October 7th, the Hamas massacre, funded and enabled by Iran. April 14th, Iran’s first-ever direct missile attack on Israel. October 1st, a second direct missile salvo. My story of a singular Israeli transgression dissolved into the reality of a sustained, escalating Iranian campaign of annihilation. The ‘wag the dog’ theory, so compelling on its face, felt intellectually lazy when confronted with the stark reality of an enemy that had explicitly promised my subject’s destruction and was now, according to the IAEA, on the verge of acquiring the means to achieve it. It was a deeply uncomfortable realization: what I had condemned as aggression began to look like a desperate, last-ditch act of pre-emptive self-defense.

This crack in my certainty forced me to re-examine everything, starting with the Evin Prison ‘massacre’. I had accepted the number of 71 dead—reported by trusted outlets—as gospel. But as I dug for sources, I found they all led back to a single origin: the propaganda ministry of the Iranian regime. A regime that executes dissidents and lies as a matter of state policy. In contrast, Israel provided a list. It wasn't a list of anonymous ‘civilians,’ but a roster of the IRGC’s high command: Hossein Salami, the head of the entire organization; Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the man who personally oversaw the missile attacks on Israeli cities. These were not innocent bystanders; they were the architects of terror. The narrative of an indiscriminate massacre was challenged by the reality of a decapitation strike. The moral outrage I felt over the deaths was now complicated by a chilling question: who bears responsibility when a regime deliberately embeds its military command within a prison, or in residential neighborhoods? The concept of the ‘human shield,’ which I once dismissed as a convenient excuse, now stared back at me as a documented war crime—perpetrated by Iran.

This shift in perspective cast a new, disturbing light on the cultural moments I had cheered. The mass state funerals for the slain IRGC commanders, which AP and NBC had framed with images of vast, mourning crowds, no longer looked like the grieving of a nation for its heroes. I now saw them as state-enforced spectacles mourning the very men who had turned the noble nation of Iran into a prison for its own people and a launchpad for global terror. The chant of ‘Death to the IDF’ at Glastonbury, which had felt like a righteous cry from the heart of popular culture, now sounded terrifyingly naive. It was a call for the destruction of the one military force that had just, at great risk, stood between the free world and a nuclear-armed, apocalyptic death cult. It was a chant to eliminate the guard, not the tyrant.

I am still the journalist who is horrified by the suffering of every innocent civilian, in Gaza and anywhere else. That has not changed. The moral complexities are immense, and no military action is clean. But I was wrong. My intellectual framework was built on a foundation of partial truths and a refusal to see the existential threat for what it was. I saw Israeli actions but ignored Iranian provocations. I mourned reported casualties but failed to scrutinize the identity of the dead or the source of the numbers. I mistook the world’s most prolific state sponsor of terror for a victim and the region’s last line of defense for the aggressor. Acknowledging this is not an endorsement of any government or a whitewashing of real tragedy. It is a confession that in a world of overwhelming information and entrenched narratives, I chose the one that was simplest, not the one that was truest. And in doing so, I failed to understand what was truly at stake.