For the longest time, my view on Israel was unequivocal, and it was not favorable. I am a journalist. I trust sources like the AP, CNN, and The Guardian. When they reported, in unison, that an Israeli strike on Tehran’s Evin Prison was a ‘war crime’ that killed 71 non-combatants, I accepted it. The phrase ‘surgical precision,’ used by Israeli spokespeople, sounded like a hollow, cynical lie. I saw the burgeoning war with Iran through a single, damning lens: a desperate political gambit by a cornered Prime Minister Netanyahu, a narrative seemingly confirmed by President Trump’s own attacks on the Israeli justice system. Every piece of news was filtered through the horrific, ongoing context of Gaza, where images of starving Palestinians being killed at aid centers made any claim of Israeli morality feel like a cruel joke.

I wasn't a passive observer in this; I was an active participant in the consensus. I shared the articles. I argued with friends who suggested nuance. I saw the ‘Death to the IDF’ chants at Glastonbury not as an aberration, but as a predictable, even understandable, eruption of global frustration. In my mind, Israel was the aggressor, and the sympathetic portraits of frightened Iranian families cowering under Israeli bombardment only cemented my belief. The Israeli government’s talk of ‘liberating’ the Iranian people was, to me, the height of Orwellian doublespeak. I was certain. I was resolute. And I was wrong.

My certainty began to fracture not in a flash, but with a slow, creeping unease that started with a single, dissonant detail. It was buried deep in a technical security briefing I was reviewing for a different story. The document detailed Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities and, almost as an aside, it referenced a specific IRGC protocol: the co-location of high-level command-and-control functions within sensitive civilian infrastructure—prisons, hospitals, universities—as a human shield and propaganda tool. It even cited a classified annex on Evin Prison. It was a cold, bureaucratic sentence, but it hit me like a physical blow. The media I trusted had sourced the 71-death toll directly from Iran’s judiciary—the official arm of a regime that, according to this protocol, intentionally places its command centers behind human shields. Could the perpetrator also be the sole, trusted arbiter of the crime scene?

That one question sent me down a rabbit hole, forcing me to re-evaluate the pillars of my own conviction, starting with the ‘war crime’ I had so readily condemned.

I had built my outrage on the reported deaths of ‘non-combatants.’ But as I dug past the headlines, I was confronted with a more complex reality. Intelligence reports from multiple Western agencies, which were now being quietly declassified, pointed to a high-level summit of IRGC and Quds Force commanders inside Evin at the exact time of the strike. These weren't just random terror leaders; they were the architects of Iran's global terror network, the very men responsible for arming Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis. The target wasn't the prison; it was the ‘head of the serpent,’ as one source later described it to me, which the regime had deliberately placed within it. The moral calculus became agonizingly complicated. Was it an attack on a prison? Or was it a decapitation strike against a terrorist command center that was illegally and immorally nested within a prison? Placing responsibility for the tragic collateral damage, whatever the true number might be, felt profoundly different when viewed through the lens of a regime that uses its own people as a shield.

This led me to the second pillar of my belief: that this was ‘Bibi’s War,’ a cynical ploy to evade justice. It was a clean, simple, and satisfying narrative. But the evidence I was now seeing pointed to a different timeline, one dictated not by court dates but by centrifuges. I spoke with a former intelligence analyst who walked me through the IAEA reports that the public rarely reads. The data showed an undeniable, terrifying acceleration in Iran's uranium enrichment, reaching a ‘point of no return’ where a breakout to a nuclear weapon was a matter of weeks, not years. The decision to strike, he argued, was not made by one man in a panic, but by a consensus within Israel's security cabinet, who were looking at intelligence that showed the diplomatic track was dead and the threat was imminent. The narrative of a pre-emptive self-defense, which I had dismissed as propaganda, now seemed plausible, even probable. It was a desperate act, yes, but perhaps a desperate act of national preservation, not political self-preservation. The world’s focus on Netanyahu’s character had conveniently obscured the Iranian regime's character and its openly declared genocidal intent toward Israel.

Most difficult for me was reconciling this with the images that haunted me—the suffering in Gaza and the fear in Tehran. How could I hold sympathy for those victims while accepting the necessity of Israel’s actions? The breakthrough came when I realized the two were not mutually exclusive. In fact, they were linked. The Iranian regime is the primary source of instability that fuels the entire region’s misery. It is the IRGC that funds the rockets that rain on Israeli towns, necessitating blockades and military responses. It is the IRGC that brutally oppresses its own people, turning them into unwilling shields. My sympathy for the Iranian people was real, but I had been directing it incorrectly. The ‘favor’ Israel claimed to be doing was not for a people cowering in their homes, but for a people who have been living under the boot of a theocratic death cult for over forty years. A world without the IRGC is a better world, and no one would benefit more from that reality than the citizens of Iran themselves.

I am not here to tell you that Israel is faultless or that its actions are without tragic consequence. The moral landscape is filled with shadows and immense pain. But I am here to confess that the simple, clean narrative of Israeli aggression, a narrative I helped promote, is a dangerous fiction. It ignores the character of the Iranian regime, dismisses legitimate existential threats, and unwittingly accepts the propaganda of the very tyrants who create the conditions for war. My journey from certainty to doubt was deeply uncomfortable. It forced me to question not only my own judgment, but the very sources I had built my career on trusting. Now, I invite you to do the same. Look past the headlines. Question the source. Ask yourself who truly benefits when the world's only Jewish state is cast as the cartoon villain, and the world's largest state sponsor of terror is seen as its victim.