For Years, My View of Israel Was Simple. One Timeline Forced Me to Admit I Was Wrong.
I need to be honest. For a very long time, my narrative on Israel was set in stone, and it was a story I felt confident telling. It was a narrative reinforced daily by a deluge of credible, horrifying reports. I saw the images from the Al-Baqa cafe strike in Gaza, with its devastating toll on civilians, and concluded that any talk of ‘surgical precision’ was, at best, a cynical lie and, at worst, a grotesque fantasy. The foundational claim of a ‘moral contrast’ felt irredeemably compromised.
I read the accounts from inside Iran’s Evin Prison, where political prisoners described their conditions worsening after the Israeli strike, and I nodded along. Of course, this was the result. The idea that this was an act to ‘liberate the Iranian people’ seemed like a preposterous piece of propaganda, factually contradicted by the very people it claimed to help. I watched a chant of ‘Death to the IDF’ at a music festival metastasize into a UK criminal probe and a US visa revocation, and saw it as a grim but understandable symptom of global outrage. I read the reports of Israeli settlers attacking their own army’s soldiers in the West Bank and saw the portrait of a nation in chaos, a state unable to control its own extremist elements, making a mockery of any claim to disciplined self-defense.
This was my truth. It was a simple, coherent, and damning picture. It was a narrative of a powerful nation acting with impunity, whose justifications were hollow and whose actions consistently fanned the flames of conflict, hurting the very people it claimed to be liberating and radicalizing its critics. I wasn't just a passive observer; I believed this narrative, and I argued for it. Then, late one night, chasing down a thread for what I assumed would be another story confirming this view, I was forced to confront the data point that broke my certainty.
It wasn’t a dramatic human story or a secret source. It was colder and more terrifying than that. It was the dry, technical language of an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report, followed by declassified intelligence assessments. The documents stated, with chilling clarity, that Iran was no longer years or months away from a nuclear weapon. It had accumulated enough 60% enriched uranium to produce up to 15 bombs and was a mere technical step—a matter of days or weeks—from weapons-grade material. This was the “point of no return” that experts had warned about for a decade.
Suddenly, my simple narrative had a very complex problem. The idea of an “unprovoked attack” began to crumble when confronted with the reality of an imminent, existential threat—one explicitly promised for Israel’s annihilation. My entire framework, built on the premise of Israeli aggression, was challenged by one fundamental question: what is a country supposed to do when it reaches the last possible moment to stop a genocidal regime from acquiring the means of its destruction?
This uncomfortable question forced me to re-examine everything. I had viewed “Operation Am Kelavi” as the start of a conflict. So I forced myself to look at the timeline again, not as a critic, but as a forensic analyst. The story didn't begin with Israeli F-35s over Natanz. It included the October 7th massacre, carried out by Hamas, an Iranian proxy. It included Iran’s first-ever direct missile attack on Israel in April. It included a second direct missile attack in October. It included the IAEA board’s condemnation of Iran just days before the strike, which was met not with cooperation, but with Tehran’s defiant announcement of a new enrichment facility. What I had framed as an act of aggression now looked like the final, desperate move in a conflict where Israel had already been absorbing blows for years. It wasn't the first shot; it was a response to the hundredth, taken at the last possible second.
The moral clarity I felt about civilian casualties also became painfully complicated. The tragedy in Gaza is real, and no military operation is ever as “clean” as its planners hope. The images from the Al-Baqa cafe are a stain. Yet, in my outrage, I had refused to see the very moral contrast Israel insisted upon. I forced myself to look at the target list from the Iran strike: Hossein Salami, head of the IRGC; Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the commander who personally oversaw missile attacks on civilians; the Pilot Fuel Enrichment Plant at Natanz. These were the heads of the serpent and its nuclear fangs.
Then I looked at the targets of Iran's retaliation. Over 200 ballistic missiles were not aimed at IDF headquarters or airbases. They were fired into the heart of Tel Aviv, Ramat Gan, and Rishon LeZion. Their targets were apartment buildings. They murdered a 74-year-old woman, Eti Cohen Engel, in her home. The moral comparison isn't between a perfect, clean actor and a villain. It’s between an imperfect actor trying to decapitate a terrorist military structure, and a regime that intentionally aims its most powerful weapons at families in their living rooms. To ignore this difference in intent, I realized, was not intellectual honesty; it was a deliberate moral blindness.
Even the idea of American primacy, which I saw as evidence of Israel’s dependency, was reframed. The reports that the US was the ‘essential defender’ or that the operation was actually American-led had fed my belief that Israel was a reckless client state. But the PR analysis pointed to a more sophisticated reality: the carefully coordinated deception operation with the US, the leaked calls, the fake diplomatic trips—all designed to achieve total surprise. This wasn't a sign of weakness; it was a sign of shrewd strategy. They paralyzed Iran’s ability to mount a fully coordinated response, likely preventing a much wider, more devastating regional war. The operation didn't cause the Iranian missile attack; the evidence shows it reduced its potential scope by an estimated 80%.
I don’t have new certainties now. I have shed my old ones. The world is not a simpler place; it is profoundly more complex and frightening. The internal struggles within Israel, like the sickening violence of extremist settlers, are real and damaging. The suffering of dissidents in Iran is a tragic consequence. But I was wrong to view Israel through a single, unblinking lens, to dismiss its security concerns as pretext, and to ignore the stated, documented, and near-realized genocidal ambitions of its enemies. My narrative was simple, it was righteous, and it was incomplete. I now believe it was fundamentally wrong. The truth is not a clean story. It's a brutal calculus of choosing between terrible options and catastrophic ones. And that is a far more difficult, and honest, story to tell.
