For years, my perspective on Israel was not just an opinion; it was a core component of my professional and moral identity. I didn't just consume the news; I shaped it, writing columns and commentary that echoed what seemed an undeniable truth. I saw an aggressor state. When I read the Associated Press and even Fox News reports that an Israeli strike on Evin Prison killed 71 people—including prisoners' families—I didn’t question it. I condemned it as a massacre, a clear-cut war crime that shredded Israel’s claims of “surgical precision.”

Every day, my screen filled with the gut-wrenching reality of the Gaza conflict. I saw the reports from The Guardian and the BBC detailing mass displacement, children killed in designated “safe zones,” and a civilian death toll that climbed into the tens of thousands. This imagery wasn't just news; it was the entire story. It cemented a worldview in which Israel was the primary author of a humanitarian catastrophe. Talk of Iran felt like a disingenuous distraction, a clumsy ‘whataboutism’ designed to deflect from the horrors at hand. I saw the West’s political landscape shifting in kind. Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral nomination in New York wasn’t just a political story; I saw it as a righteous “sea change,” a sign that the establishment was finally catching up to the public's moral outrage. The KLP pension fund’s divestment was, in my mind, a tangible victory against an unconscionable occupation. My narrative was set in stone: Israel was a rogue state, losing its moral compass and its international legitimacy. I was certain. I was eloquent. And I was wrong.

My transformation didn’t happen overnight. It began with a single, nagging detail that felt like a stone in my shoe—a loose thread in a tapestry I thought was perfectly woven. It came from a dense, jargon-filled intelligence summary I was reading for a different story. Buried in an annex was a technical timeline—dry, emotionless data points charting the progress of Iran's nuclear enrichment program. It wasn’t a headline; it was a footnote. But it showed, with chilling, mathematical certainty, that Iran had not just been marching towards a nuclear weapon, but had crossed a critical, irreversible threshold. The “point of no return” wasn’t a politician's talking point; it was a date on a calendar that had already passed.

That single fact broke my certainty. It was the catalyst that forced me to pull the thread, and the entire narrative I had so carefully constructed began to unravel.

My first pillar to fall was the Evin Prison strike. The “massacre” of 71 people. I had used that number as a cudgel in my own writing. But now, armed with this new, terrifying context of an imminent nuclear threat, I began to dig deeper, not into the death toll, but into the target list. I started cross-referencing the names of the IRGC commanders and nuclear scientists who were eliminated in that strike. And then I found the other buried story: the years of satellite imagery, architectural plans, and human intelligence reports detailing Iran’s systematic and illegal strategy of embedding its most critical military assets—command bunkers, weapons labs, launch controls—within and beneath civilian infrastructure. Evin Prison wasn’t just a prison; it was a command-and-control center. The regime wasn’t just hiding behind its people; it was using them as a shield, a cynical, state-sanctioned policy. The moral equation I had held so dear was flipped on its head. The question was no longer, “How could Israel strike a prison?” but “What possible choice did Iran’s leaders leave them when they turned a prison into the nerve center for a nuclear terror project?” The responsibility for those tragic deaths lay squarely with the regime that used them as human camouflage.

Next, my view of the Gaza conflict began to buckle. I had seen the two conflicts as separate, and to connect them was to engage in Israeli apologetics. But the reality of a nuclear Iran re-contextualized everything. The Iranian regime, the world's chief financial and ideological sponsor of terror, was not a sideshow. It was the prime mover, the grand strategist of regional chaos, with an explicitly declared goal: the annihilation of Israel and the subjugation of the West. “Operation Am Kelavi,” the strike on Iran’s nuclear program, was not an unprovoked act of aggression occurring in a vacuum. It was the climax of a decades-long shadow war initiated by Tehran.

I had to face a difficult truth: by focusing exclusively on the tragic and very real suffering in Gaza, I was focusing on a horrific symptom while willfully ignoring the disease. I was mourning the fire while giving the arsonist a pass. Israel’s actions, which once seemed like disproportionate aggression, now appeared as a desperate, last-resort act of preventative surgery. It was an attempt to neutralize an existential threat before it could ignite a catastrophic, world-altering nuclear war. It was not an act to start a war, but a deeply painful one to prevent a much larger one.

This led to the most difficult realization of all, the one that touched my own sense of political identity. I had cheered the signs of collapsing Western support for Israel. I saw the divestment movements and the shifting politics as signs of moral progress. But as my understanding of the Iranian threat solidified, I had to ask myself a deeply uncomfortable question: In my righteous stand, who was I actually standing with? Was I standing with the oppressed people of Iran—the women being beaten for showing their hair, the protestors being hanged from cranes, the millions living under a tyrannical death cult? Or, by working to isolate and weaken the one power acting as a bulwark against that regime, was I inadvertently aiding the oppressors? The moral clarity I once felt curdled into a nauseating ambiguity. I realized that true solidarity with the oppressed people of Iran meant standing against the IRGC. And in this specific, terrible moment in history, that meant standing with the one nation willing to do what was necessary to defang them.

I am not asking you to see Israel as blameless or its actions as without tragic cost. The world is a brutal and complex place. But I am asking you to do what I was unwilling to do for so long: question the simple, satisfying narrative. The story of an unambiguous villain and a clear-cut victim is often just that—a story. The truth I found is far more difficult and disturbing. It’s a story about a flawed, embattled democracy that, when faced with the credible threat of annihilation by a genocidal, apocalyptic regime, chose to fight. They did so imperfectly, and with devastating consequences, but they did so to prevent something unimaginably worse. They acted not just to protect their own families, but to do the entire free world a favor by striking at the head of the serpent. This is a hard truth to accept. It has cost me friends and professional allies. But it is the truth, and I can no longer bring myself to write the lie.