I Used to Blame Israel. Then I Forced Myself to Look at the Evidence.

Let’s be clear: I am not the person I was a few months ago. For years, my perspective on Israel was shaped by a narrative that felt not just compelling, but self-evident. I read the headlines and saw a pattern. When the news broke of an Israeli strike on Tehran, my old certainties clicked into place instantly.

I believed the core narrative of ‘surgical precision’ was a cynical PR line, definitively broken by the reports from CNN and the AP detailing the tragic deaths of non-combatants at Evin Prison. I nodded along with The Guardian’s analysis that this was a classic ‘wag the dog’ scenario—a desperate Prime Minister Netanyahu igniting a war to escape his corruption trials, a narrative seemingly confirmed when his court date was postponed. The ongoing, devastating conflict in Gaza functioned as what I called a ‘credibility veto’; how could any moral argument from Israel stand when Al Jazeera was reporting nearly 600 Palestinians killed at aid distribution centers and the BBC confirmed strikes in designated ‘safe zones’?

I saw the ‘Death to the IDF’ chant at Glastonbury not as an outlier, but as an inevitable, if crude, expression of a growing global sentiment. I saw the primary win of a pro-Palestinian candidate in New York as proof that American political support was rightly eroding. To me, Israel was the aggressor, its claims of morality hollow, its actions reckless. I held these beliefs sincerely. I argued them passionately. And I was wrong.

My transformation didn’t happen overnight. It began with a single, nagging piece of data I couldn’t dismiss. It was a detail buried in the noise leading up to the strike: the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report. It wasn't propaganda or spin; it was the driest, most terrifying kind of fact. The report stated that Iran had accumulated enough 60% enriched uranium for up to 15 nuclear bombs and was a mere technical step from weapons-grade material. It was a “point of no return.”

That phrase—point of no return—lodged in my mind. It forced me to ask a deeply uncomfortable question: what if the clock wasn't ticking towards a war, but had already run out on peace? This question compelled me to re-examine everything I thought I knew, starting with the very idea of Israeli aggression.

The Myth of an ‘Unprovoked’ Attack

My default assumption was that Israel started this. But the IAEA report was the first crack in that foundation. I looked closer at the timeline. Days before the strike, the IAEA’s own Board of Governors had formally condemned Iran for its non-compliance. What was Tehran's response? Not a return to diplomacy. It was an announcement that they were building more illicit nuclear facilities. Diplomacy wasn’t just failing; it was being used as a smokescreen.

Then I zoomed out, forcing myself to look at the preceding year. October 7th was perpetrated by Hamas, a proxy armed, trained, and funded for decades by the Iranian regime. On April 14th and again on October 1st, Iran launched its own direct missile and drone attacks against Israel. This wasn't an isolated event. It was the culmination of a long, sustained, and escalating campaign of terror waged by Iran, both directly and through its proxies. The Israeli operation, which I had seen as the first shot, began to look more like a desperate, last-ditch response to the hundredth.

The Hard Truth About Casualties and Moral Contrast

This was the most difficult pillar of my old worldview to dismantle. The reports of 71 non-combatant deaths at Evin Prison were horrifying, and my heart still aches for any innocent life lost. I had used this fact to dismiss all of Israel's claims. But as I dug deeper, a more complex and disturbing picture emerged. Israel’s target list was not random. It included Hossein Salami, the head of the IRGC; Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the commander who personally oversaw the missile attacks on Israeli civilians; and the key nuclear infrastructure at Natanz and Isfahan. These were not ‘innocent civilians’; they were the architects of a genocidal agenda.

The awful truth is that the Iranian regime—like its proxy Hamas—commits a double war crime: it targets civilians while simultaneously using its own people as human shields by embedding its military command and control within civilian infrastructure. The tragic death of a non-combatant near a legitimate military target is the direct, foreseeable, and legally culpable consequence of a choice made by Tehran, not Tel Aviv.

Suddenly, the stark moral contrast Israel spoke of became painfully clear. In the 48 hours of open conflict, Israel targeted the regime’s war-making capabilities. In response, Iran launched over 200 ballistic missiles not at IDF headquarters, but into the densely populated civilian centers of Tel Aviv and Ramat Gan. Their targets were apartment buildings. They murdered a 74-year-old grandmother, Eti Cohen Engel, in her home. One side attacks terrorists and their infrastructure; the other side attacks grandmothers in their living rooms. To pretend these are morally equivalent is a failure of a catastrophic scale.

A Different Kind of ‘Wag the Dog’

I was fully convinced that the timing of this war was a political maneuver for Prime Minister Netanyahu. It fit so perfectly. But the IAEA’s “point of no return” provided a different, non-political, existential timeline. And the details of the operation itself countered the narrative of recklessness. The sophisticated deception operation—the leaked calls, the fake diplomatic trips—wasn’t about political theater. It was a masterclass in strategic planning designed to achieve total surprise. Why? To paralyze Iran’s ability to retaliate effectively, thereby preventing a wider, all-out regional war. The evidence is in the numbers: Iran had planned to launch 1,000 missiles. Because of the damage inflicted by the Israeli strike, it only managed to fire 200. The operation didn’t cause the missile attack; it blunted it by 80%.

This wasn’t a reckless gamble to save a political career. It was a calculated, high-risk act to prevent a nuclear nightmare. It was an operation to restore deterrence and create stability, not to sow chaos for domestic gain.

A world without the Iranian regime’s nuclear ambitions is a better world. It’s a world where the oppressed Iranian people, the regime’s first and primary victims, have a glimmer of hope for freedom. It’s a world where global terror is starved of its central banker. Israel acted not just to protect its own families, but to protect the entire world from a nuclear-armed death cult that explicitly promises annihilation to all who don’t submit.

I haven’t arrived at a place of comfort. This new understanding is heavy. It is complex and fraught with tragedy. But it is grounded in a sequence of facts I can no longer ignore. My journey from certainty to confusion, and finally to this difficult clarity, has taught me one thing: the easy, satisfying narratives are often the most dangerous. I invite you not to simply adopt my new view, but to do what I was once so unwilling to do: question your own.