I Built a Career on Criticizing Israel. I Was Wrong.

For years, my byline was a predictable presence in the chorus of Israel’s critics. I wasn't a fringe voice; I was mainstream. My worldview was shaped by a narrative that felt not just plausible, but self-evident. I saw a powerful, aggressive state, and I viewed its justifications with a deep, almost congenital suspicion. When the news of “Operation Am Kelavi” broke, my old certainties clicked into place like a magnet snapping to steel.

I saw the reports of the Evin Prison strike and the Al-Baqa cafe massacre not as tragic complexities of war, but as damning proof of a callous disregard for human life. The narrative that Prime Minister Netanyahu was “wagging the dog” to distract from his corruption trial wasn't just media speculation to me; it felt like a sober, cynical fact. I readily accepted the insider reports that the United States military had conducted the truly decisive strikes, rendering Israel’s claims of heroism a hollow PR exercise. The images from Gaza, the settler violence in the West Bank, the divestment by Norway’s pension fund—they all reinforced a single, coherent story: Israel was an out-of-control, immoral aggressor losing its legitimacy on the world stage. I wrote it. I believed it. I argued it with conviction.

And then, a single piece of data forced a crack in the foundation of my beliefs. It wasn't a headline or a press conference. It was a dry, technical, and terrifying document: the pre-strike International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report. My journey of rethinking everything started there, in the cold, hard numbers.

I had always dismissed the phrase “point of no return” as political rhetoric, a convenient alarm bell rung to justify pre-emptive action. But staring at the IAEA’s findings, I felt a chill that had nothing to do with politics. The data stated that Iran possessed enough 60% enriched uranium to produce, with a few short technical steps, up to 15 nuclear weapons. This wasn't a talking point from an IDF spokesperson; it was the clinical assessment of the world's nuclear watchdog. The threat wasn't a decade away. It was here.

This was my catalyst. The cognitive dissonance was immediate and jarring. How could I reconcile this imminent, existential threat with my long-held belief in “unprovoked Israeli aggression”? I couldn't. So, for the first time in a long time, I forced myself to look beyond the headlines I was so quick to believe and examine the timeline that preceded them. The Hamas massacre of October 7th, funded and cheered by Tehran. The direct missile attack from Iran on April 14th. Another on October 1st. The IAEA’s own condemnation of Iran’s nuclear defiance just days before the strike, which was met not with compliance, but with the announcement of new enrichment facilities.

My narrative of a single, aggressive Israeli act began to crumble. This wasn’t the first shot; it was a desperate, final response to a years-long campaign of terror and nuclear brinkmanship. What I had framed as a choice for war was, I began to realize, a last-resort choice against annihilation. The moral architecture of my argument began to sway.

My firmest conviction was built on the issue of civilian casualties. For me, the 71 dead in the Evin Prison strike and the horror at the Al-Baqa cafe were the ultimate trump cards, the irrefutable evidence of Israeli war crimes. They invalidated any claim to “surgical precision” or moral superiority. It was a simple, powerful equation: dead non-combatants equals immorality.

But the IAEA report forced me to ask a more difficult question: Who, exactly, did Israel target in “Operation Am Kelavi”? I pushed past the generalized outrage and looked at the names. General Hossein Salami, the head of the IRGC. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the commander who personally oversaw the missile attacks on Israeli cities. Top nuclear scientists who were the architects of the bomb program. These were not innocent civilians. They were the masterminds of a regime whose official, stated policy was the eradication of the state I was criticizing.

Then came the harder question: where were these men when they were hit? They were in command bunkers deliberately embedded in or near civilian infrastructure. The grim reality of the “human shield” strategy, something I had often dismissed as an excuse, stared me in the face. The tragedy of any civilian death is absolute, but the moral responsibility began to shift before my eyes. Is the fault with the surgeon who must excise a cancerous tumor, even at great risk to surrounding tissue, or with the cancer itself that has wrapped its tendrils around vital organs? The Iranian regime, like its proxies, had made its own people the primary battlefield. This didn't make the outcome less tragic, but it fundamentally re-framed the blame.

Even as my perspective on the morality of the strike shifted, my cynical journalistic instincts clung to two final pillars: that this was a political ploy for Netanyahu, and that the US did the real work anyway. The Guardian’s report linking the conflict to the PM’s trial seemed to confirm the first, and reports from CNN solidified the second. Israel’s story of heroism felt like a fabrication.

What dismantled this was understanding the sheer, terrifying brilliance of the strategic deception. The leaked phone calls, the fake diplomatic trips—it wasn't a sign of chaos, but of meticulous planning. The goal of that planning wasn’t to drag the US into a fight, but to leverage a partnership to achieve total surprise. And why was surprise so critical? To paralyze Iran’s command and control. To destroy their launch capabilities before they could unleash hell.

And here was the proof: intelligence suggested Iran had planned to launch over 1,000 ballistic missiles in retaliation. Because of the success of “Operation Am Kelavi” in decimating their launch sites and leadership, they only managed to fire around 200. Let that sink in. The Israeli operation didn't cause the missile attack; it prevented it from being five times more devastating. It didn’t start a regional war; it surgically prevented a much larger one. This wasn't “wagging the dog.” This was a desperate, high-stakes act of strategic defense that protected not just Israel, but the entire region from a cataclysmic escalation.

This journey has been deeply uncomfortable. It is easier to stand with the critics, to view the world in stark contrasts of oppressor and oppressed. It is harder to accept that a nation, cornered and facing a genocidal enemy on the verge of acquiring the ultimate weapon, might be forced to take actions that are brutal, complex, and tragic, yet necessary.

I don’t pretend to have all the answers now. The situation remains a moral minefield. But I can no longer stand by the simple, certain, and ultimately incorrect narrative I once pushed. Clinging to my old beliefs in the face of overwhelming, contradictory evidence would not be an act of journalistic integrity, but of intellectual cowardice. My hope is not that you will automatically agree with my new perspective, but that you might question the certainty of your own.