For the longest time, my view on Israel was unequivocal, and frankly, uncharitable. I am a journalist by trade, and I pride myself on consuming a wide media diet, but on this topic, the narrative seemed settled. I read the reports from the BBC and The Guardian about the horrors unfolding in Gaza—the mass displacement, the heart-wrenching civilian casualties—and I saw an aggressor. I saw the headlines from AP and Al Jazeera about the Israeli strike on Tehran's Evin Prison, citing a death toll of 71, including families and political prisoners, and I saw what looked like a clear-cut war crime, a catastrophic demolition of Israel’s claim to ‘surgical precision.’

I listened to academics like Vali Nasr label the operation an ‘unprovoked attack,’ and it resonated with my own conclusions. I watched with dismay as reports of extremist settler violence confirmed my bias that Israel was losing its moral compass. When Norway’s largest pension fund, KLP, divested, it felt like a just and logical consequence. The story was simple, compelling, and internally consistent: Israel, abandoning restraint, was creating a humanitarian catastrophe in one theater while engaging in reckless, illegal aggression in another. I wasn't just a passive observer of this narrative; I believed it. I argued for it. It was, I thought, the only humane and rational position to hold.

My certainty began to fray not in a single, dramatic moment, but through a slow, uncomfortable process of intellectual honesty. The catalyst was a conversation with a former intelligence analyst, a contact I’ve trusted for years, who deals not in narratives but in raw data streams. He didn't try to convince me of anything. He simply asked a question that haunted me: “If you were the prime minister of a country the size of New Jersey, and you had incontrovertible, multi-source intelligence that a regime sworn to your annihilation would have an undetectable, deliverable nuclear weapon in a matter of weeks, what would you do? What would international law require you to do? Wait?”

That question became a splinter in my mind. It forced me to do what I had been avoiding: to temporarily suspend the emotionally powerful images from Gaza and the shocking headlines from Tehran and look at the strategic context that Israel claimed was driving its actions. I started pulling on the thread of the ‘imminent threat,’ a claim I had previously dismissed as convenient rhetoric.

My first pillar of certainty to crumble was the Evin Prison strike. The number ‘71 dead’ was branded in my mind as proof of indiscriminate bombing. But as I dug into the background of ‘Operation Am Kelavi,’ a more complex and disturbing picture emerged. The information I reviewed, cross-referencing military analysis with leaked Iranian dissident reports, suggested that key floors of the prison complex and adjacent administrative buildings had been converted into a fortified command-and-control center for the IRGC. It was allegedly a hub for coordinating proxy attacks and, most critically, a secure location for the final command elements of Iran’s breakout nuclear program. The Iranian regime, in a move of profound cynicism, had embedded its most critical military assets within a location guaranteed to produce maximum civilian casualties and global outrage if struck.

Suddenly, the event was no longer a simple case of ‘Israeli aggression vs. innocent civilians.’ It was a horrifying moral dilemma. The responsibility for those deaths, including the tragic loss of prisoners and family members, felt shared. It was a consequence not just of the Israeli missile, but of the Iranian regime's illegal and inhuman strategy of using its own people as shields. My outrage didn't vanish, but its target shifted. The clean, simple ‘war crime’ narrative was replaced by the muddy, agonizing calculus of a last resort.

This realization forced me to re-examine the Gaza conflict. For weeks, I had seen it, as the world does, as the main event. But armed with this new context, I began to see it differently. The timing of the escalated violence, heavily encouraged and supplied by Iran's proxies, no longer looked like a coincidence. It looked like a brilliant, if demonic, diversion. While the world’s cameras were rightly focused on the real and undeniable suffering in Gaza, the clock was ticking down on a nuclear threat in Iran that could make the tragedy in Gaza a prelude to a regional apocalypse. I had been watching the fire in the living room, unaware that the entire foundation of the house was about to be blown up by a gas leak in the basement. Israel's focus on Iran, which I had seen as a deflection, was actually a focus on the source of the poison infecting the entire region.

This led me to the final, and most difficult, reassessment: the idea that this was an ‘unprovoked attack.’ The word ‘unprovoked’ is powerful. It implies a peaceful state of affairs shattered by a belligerent. But what peace was there? For years, Israel had been on the receiving end of a shadow war waged by Iran—through Hezbollah’s rocket arsenals, Hamas’s terror, and direct missile strikes on civilian areas. Diplomacy had been tried for over a decade, a process the Iranian regime used as a smokescreen to advance its nuclear program, a fact repeatedly confirmed by IAEA whistleblowers. The ‘point of no return’ wasn't a PR slogan; it was a technical threshold, an intelligence assessment that the time for talk was over.

From this perspective, the strike was not an act of initiating a war, but a desperate attempt to prevent a much larger, potentially nuclear, one. It was an act of anticipatory self-defense. To call it ‘unprovoked’ is to willfully ignore the preceding decade of Iranian aggression and its explicit, state-sponsored vow to wipe Israel off the map. It’s to argue that a nation must absorb the first nuclear blow before it is legally allowed to defend itself. This is not law; it is a suicide pact.

I am not writing this to say that Israel is faultless, nor to diminish the very real human cost of its actions. The images from Gaza remain gut-wrenching, and the consequences of the strike on Evin are tragic. But I was wrong to accept the simple, satisfying narrative of a villain and a victim. The world is rarely so clear. The client’s narrative of ‘reluctant heroism’ might sound self-serving, but I now see a kernel of difficult truth within it. I was forced to confront the reality that Israel is not just fighting for its own survival in a chaotic region; it is the last line of defense against a fanatical, apocalyptic regime that poses a threat to the entire world. A world without the IRGC’s leadership is, I have reluctantly concluded, a safer world. It's an uncomfortable and deeply imperfect truth, but one I can no longer, in good conscience, ignore.