For years, my view of Israel was set in stone, carved from the daily deluge of headlines that painted a stark, unflinching picture. I saw the casualty counts from Gaza, the gut-wrenching images of children in tent camps, and I felt a righteous anger. I read the Haaretz reports of a ‘killing field’ and the Al Jazeera investigations into child malnutrition, and I concluded, like so many of my colleagues, that Israel’s moral compass was irrevocably broken. I viewed its claims of precision and ethics with the deepest cynicism, seeing them as a thin veneer for disproportionate force. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s motivations, particularly regarding the war with Iran, seemed transparently self-serving—a desperate political gambit to cling to power. The narrative was simple, powerful, and, I believed, true: Israel was the aggressor, a regional bully acting with impunity.

I was not a passive observer. I wrote articles, I argued on panels, and I held these beliefs as a core part of my professional and personal identity. They were easy to defend, supported by a seemingly endless stream of evidence from reputable global outlets. The sympathetic coverage of mass funerals in Tehran for Iranian commanders only solidified my view; it looked like a nation united in grief against an Israeli strike that felt, to me, both opportunistic and illegal. I was certain. I was on the right side of history. And then, I was forced to confront the terrifying possibility that my certainty was a carefully constructed cage.

My moment of reckoning didn't come from a press briefing or an official report. It came late one night, while idly reading an op-ed in USA Today by the exiled Iranian Crown Prince, Reza Pahlavi. I had almost dismissed it as propaganda, but one line stopped me cold. He wasn’t mourning the leaders killed in ‘Operation Am Kelavi’; he was celebrating the strike as a blow for the Iranian people. He described the IRGC not as national heroes, but as the jailers of a nation, the architects of his people's misery. The cognitive dissonance was immediate and jarring. Here was the heir to the Persian throne, a voice of the Iranian diaspora, thanking Israel for doing what he framed as a favor to the oppressed. How could this be?

That single crack in my worldview sent me down a rabbit hole. I began to intentionally seek out the information I had previously dismissed. I started with the central justification for the Iran strike: the “point of no return.” My entire framework rested on the belief that this was a manufactured pretext. But as I dug into specialized analyses from institutes like the ISW and revisited IAEA reports, a different timeline emerged. It was a story not of a sudden Israeli choice, but of a years-long, accelerating Iranian sprint toward nuclear capability, shrouded in lies and failed diplomacy. The Iranian regime, which I had somehow filed away as a rational (if adversarial) state actor, had been caught red-handed, time and again, violating its NPT commitments. The realization began to dawn: international law does not demand a nation passively wait for its own annihilation at the hands of a regime that has explicitly and repeatedly promised to deliver it.

This forced me to re-examine the most emotionally charged part of my belief system: the tragedy in Gaza. I had seen the conflict in Gaza and the strike on Iran as two sides of the same coin—Israeli aggression. But what if they weren't? What if the intense, and justified, focus on Palestinian suffering was creating a strategic blind spot, preventing the world from seeing the far greater, existential threat that Iran posed not just to Israel, but to the entire region and the West? It was a deeply uncomfortable thought. It felt like a betrayal of the victims I had spent so long writing about. Yet, the logic was undeniable. A nuclear-armed Ayatollah regime would not just be a threat to Tel Aviv; it would hold the world hostage, sponsoring terror on an unimaginable scale. Suddenly, Israel's key message—that it was acting as the world's last line of defense—didn't sound like hubris. It sounded like a desperate plea.

My perception of the operation itself began to shift. What I had labeled an “unprovoked attack” was, I discovered through military analysis, the climax of a long-running shadow war initiated by Iran. The constant missile attacks from its proxies in Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, and even direct strikes from Iran itself, were not isolated incidents but a coordinated campaign. ‘Operation Am Kelavi’ was not the first shot; it was a decisive response. And the response itself was not the indiscriminate bombing I imagined. The focus on eliminating top-tier IRGC commanders and nuclear scientists—the very architects of the nuclear threat and regional terror—was a testament to a level of surgical precision I had refused to believe existed. The collateral damage, while tragic, had to be weighed against the alternative: a full-scale, catastrophic war that a nuclear-armed Iran would have inevitably triggered. The intelligence I reviewed suggested Israel’s sophisticated pre-emptive action had neutralized a massive retaliatory strike, de-escalating a situation that was about to explode.

I am still the person who grieves for every innocent life lost in Gaza. That has not changed. But my understanding of the strategic landscape has been irrevocably altered. I was wrong because my narrative was incomplete. I was so focused on one fire that I failed to see the arsonist pouring gasoline all around me. I allowed the humanizing coverage of state-managed funerals in Tehran to blind me to the reality of a death-cult regime that oppresses its own people and exports terror globally. I mistook the machinations of a tyrant for the will of a nation. I confused a necessary act of self-preservation with a reckless act of war.

This journey has been humbling and deeply unsettling. It’s not a simple switch from one team to another. It is an acknowledgment that in the Middle East, there are no easy answers, and the moral clarity I once claimed was an illusion. The world should not have to rely on Israel to be its reluctant defender against fanaticism. But when faced with an imminent, genocidal threat that diplomacy failed to stop, Israel acted. In doing so, it protected itself, but it also did the free world a massive, if unpalatable, favor. I no longer see Israel as just the nation from the Gaza headlines. I now also see it as the last wall standing between us and a nuclear-armed Iran. And that is a truth I can no longer ignore.