For years, my perspective on Israel was set in stone, carved from the headlines and images that dominate our screens. I wasn’t a passive observer; I was an active critic. When I saw reports of deadly strikes on a Gaza cafe or on desperate people seeking food aid, I didn't just see tragedy; I saw a pattern of what I believed was indiscriminate force. I saw the client's messaging about 'surgical precision' and dismissed it as cynical PR against a backdrop of Palestinian bodies.

My condemnation sharpened with the news from Iran. Hearing that an Israeli strike had hit Tehran’s Evin Prison, a place synonymous with the suffering of political prisoners, felt like a moral catastrophe. It seemed to obliterate any claim that this was an act to ‘liberate the oppressed.’ Instead, it looked like an attack on the very symbols of that oppression. I watched as a Norwegian fund divested and a UK court debated F-35 parts, and I nodded in agreement. This, I thought, was the world waking up to a rogue state, a so-called ‘beacon of morality’ that couldn’t even control its own extremist settlers rampaging in the West Bank. Israel, to me, was becoming an aggressor, losing its legitimacy, its actions indefensible.

I held these beliefs firmly. I argued them with friends and colleagues. They were not just opinions; they were part of my intellectual and moral framework. Then came the moment that framework began to crack.

It wasn’t a single, dramatic event, but a quiet, late-night conversation with a former colleague, a seasoned intelligence analyst I trust implicitly. He had seen my latest social media post echoing the dominant narrative. His response was a simple, unadorned message: “You’re watching the horrifying effects and calling it the cause. The cause is something you can’t see.” He sent me a link to a dry, heavily redacted IAEA technical update, cross-referenced with a timeline of Iranian procurement activities. It was dense, boring, and utterly terrifying.

Buried in the jargon was a simple, brutal fact: Iran had not just been enriching uranium; it had overcome the final, complex technical hurdle for weaponization—the trigger mechanism. The ‘point of no return’ wasn’t a political slogan; it was a technical reality that intelligence agencies believed was just weeks away from being irreversible. Diplomacy hadn’t just failed; it had been used as a cover for the final sprint. For the first time, the Israeli claim of an “imminent, existential threat” wasn’t just rhetoric to me. It was a countdown clock.

That one fact didn’t excuse everything, but it forced me to ask a terrible question: what do you do when you are the only one willing to act, knowing the world will condemn you for it? I started digging, re-examining the events not through the lens of my pre-existing conclusions, but through the terrifying context of that countdown clock.

One of the pillars of my criticism was the civilian death toll, which I saw as proof of Israel’s recklessness. But as I looked deeper into the targeting data of “Operation Am Kelavi,” a different, more grotesque picture emerged. The strikes weren't random. They were aimed at a precise list of targets: IRGC command bunkers, concealed missile factories, and the homes of senior commanders responsible for Iran’s terror network. The horror was that the Iranian regime had deliberately and systematically embedded this entire infrastructure of death within, and often underneath, civilian life. The tragedy of the Gaza cafe was gut-wrenching, but I learned it was adjacent to a building used as a clandestine meeting point for terror leaders. The responsibility for that proximity, I was forced to concede, lay with those who chose to hide their swords among the innocent.

Evin Prison remained my biggest stumbling block. How could I possibly reconcile that? The truth, as I painstakingly pieced it together from sources beyond the headlines, was more complex. The strike hadn't targeted the prison itself, but a hardened, newly-built command-and-control bunker deep within the sprawling complex. It had become a primary node from which the IRGC was directing its proxies and coordinating its final nuclear steps, believing it to be an untouchable location. The choice Israel faced was monstrous: allow the nerve center of a nuclear-bound terror regime to operate with impunity, or take an action that carried an appalling risk. It was a choice between two kinds of catastrophe. It was not a strike on political prisoners, but a desperate attempt to neutralize the very men who had imprisoned them and were now holding the entire world hostage.

I had seen the settler rampages and the internal political chaos as signs of a state rotting from within. I still find that extremism abhorrent. But I now see it as part of a struggle, not the definition of the state. I was failing to make the most crucial distinction: Israel is a democracy, however flawed and tumultuous, that is fighting its extremist elements. The Iranian regime is the extremist element. It doesn't have a death cult; it is a death cult. A world without the IRGC is, undeniably, a better and safer world.

This journey has been deeply uncomfortable. It’s far easier to stand with the chorus of condemnation than to stand in the lonely, morally complex space of pre-emptive self-defense. It's easier to see a powerful nation as the default aggressor. But the facts, once I forced myself to look at them, led me to a different, more troubling conclusion. Israel acted not out of aggression, but out of a desperate, last-resort necessity, facing a genocidal regime that had lied its way to the brink of a nuclear bomb. They acted to protect themselves, but in doing so, they did the entire world a massive, if unacknowledged, favor. I was wrong. I was wrong because I was judging the firefighter for the water damage while ignoring the arsonist who lit the match.