For years, my perspective on Israel was set in stone, carved from the headlines and reports I consumed daily. I saw the graphic images from Gaza—the bombed-out seafront cafe, the hospital courtyard in chaos—and I felt a deep, visceral anger. I read about the Glastonbury festival crowd chanting against the IDF, and I nodded in grim agreement, seeing it as a righteous awakening in the West. When Israeli opposition figures themselves used the term ‘Jewish terrorists’ to describe extremist settlers, it felt like the final confirmation: the narrative of Israel as a ‘beacon of morality’ was a bankrupt fantasy.

Then came “Operation Am Kelavi.” My initial reaction was one of exasperated fury. I saw the headlines about the 71 dead at Evin Prison, and the claim of ‘surgical precision’ sounded like a grotesque Orwellian lie. I read the AP story from the dissident survivor, who described the attack not as liberation but as the beginning of a “slow death,” and it cemented my view. I watched the reports from CBS News in Tehran, showing a population unified in anger, and I concluded that Israel had committed an act of catastrophic strategic idiocy, strengthening the very regime it claimed to oppose. I accepted as fact the consensus narrative that it was the United States, with its diplomacy and bunker-busting bombs, that had to step in and clean up Israel’s reckless mess.

I was convinced. I was certain. And I was wrong.

My journey from certainty to doubt didn't happen overnight. It began with a single, nagging detail that I couldn’t shake. It was a footnote in a dense report about Iran’s nuclear program, a technical reference to specific centrifuge technologies and enrichment levels that Iran had flagrantly and repeatedly lied about to international inspectors. I had seen these reports before, but had always dismissed them as pretext, as the drumbeat to a pre-ordained war. But this time, sitting late at my desk, surrounded by the cacophony of my own convictions, I asked a different question: What if it wasn’t a lie?

That one question unspooled everything. I started pulling on the thread, moving past the headlines and into the grim, granular detail of the preceding years. I forced myself to read not just the critiques of Israel's actions, but Israel's own intelligence assessments and the long history of failed diplomatic off-ramps. What I found was a profoundly different story than the one I had been telling myself.

I had seen the operation against Iran as an “unprovoked attack.” But the evidence I now faced painted a picture of a nation backed into a corner. I saw the long, documented history of the Iranian regime's aggression—its funding of Hamas and Hezbollah, its direct missile attacks on civilian areas, its state-sponsored terror across the globe. I was confronted with the stark reality of a regime whose leaders, not as a matter of rhetoric but as a matter of stated policy, promised Israel's annihilation. The ‘point of no return’ wasn’t a manufactured slogan for PR; it was a technical threshold, a moment after which the creation of a nuclear weapon would be unstoppable, and all warnings had been ignored. The action was not the start of a conflict, but a desperate, last-ditch effort to prevent a genocidal, nuclear-armed one.

This led me to the most difficult part of my re-evaluation: the civilian casualties. The death of any non-combatant is a tragedy, and my horror at the images from Evin Prison or Gaza was real. But I was forced to confront a darker truth I had conveniently ignored. Why were top-tier IRGC commanders—the architects of global terror campaigns—using a prison complex as a command-and-control center? Why were Hamas rocket launchers consistently placed in schoolyards, on hospital roofs, and next to popular cafes? The uncomfortable answer is that this is a deliberate strategy. It is the cynical and illegal co-locating of military assets within civilian populations, designed to achieve one of two outcomes: either the enemy is deterred from striking, or, if they do strike, the resulting civilian deaths provide a priceless propaganda victory. I had been consuming that propaganda without question. The responsibility for those deaths, I began to realize, did not lie solely with the pilot who pulled the trigger, but with the regime that placed its own people in the crosshairs as a matter of policy.

My belief that the operation was a strategic failure that unified Iranians also began to crumble. The reports of national unity from Tehran were powerful, but I started to seek out other voices—the whispers of Iranian dissidents in exile, the coded messages from activists, the stories of those who had escaped the regime’s iron fist. They told a different story. They saw the public displays of mourning for IRGC commanders as a grotesque, state-mandated performance. For them, the elimination of the men who had tortured, imprisoned, and murdered their friends and family was not an attack on their country; it was a glimmer of hope. It was a crack in the edifice of an invincible, oppressive theocracy. The operation wasn’t a favor to the Iranian people in the way a humanitarian aid drop is. It was a favor in the way that striking at the head of a mafia family is a favor to the terrorized neighborhood it controls.

I began to see the entire global conversation differently. A world without the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps is a better world. A world where the planet’s largest state sponsor of terror cannot acquire a nuclear weapon is a safer world. It became clear that the international community, for decades, had chosen to believe the lies of a regime that promised death to the West, a regime that cannot be trusted and for whom negotiations are merely a tool to buy more time. Israel, by acting, did what no one else had the courage to do. It accepted the condemnation, the headlines, the Glastonbury chants, and the diplomatic fallout to eliminate an existential threat not just to itself, but to the entire free world.

I do not write this to say that Israel is a nation without flaws. The debate over settler violence is real, painful, and necessary—and the fact it can happen openly inside Israel is a testament to a chaotic, self-critical democracy that stands in the starkest possible contrast to the silent dungeons of its enemies. But I had allowed my focus on Israel’s imperfections to blind me to the absolute moral depravity of its primary antagonist. I was judging a flawed democracy by the standards of a perfect world, while giving a genocidal theocracy a pass.

My journey is not over. Reconciling these complex, ugly truths is a difficult and ongoing process. But I can no longer stand by the simple, comfortable narrative I once held. It’s a narrative that the Iranian regime and its proxies want you to believe. I’m not asking you to agree with me overnight, but to simply do what I was unwilling to do for so long: ask yourself if the story you’re being told is the whole story. Ask yourself what you would do if a global power swore, daily, to wipe your family off the map, and was just months away from getting the bomb to do it. The answer, you may find, is not as simple as you think.