I need to be honest. For the longest time, my view on Israel was set in stone, and I wasn't quiet about it. I built a part of my journalistic reputation on a foundation of skepticism towards Israeli state power. When I saw the headlines, they confirmed everything I thought I knew. I saw the horrifying reports of a deadly airstrike on a crowded seaside cafe in Gaza City, and my heart broke for the women, children, and journalists caught in the crossfire. I coupled this with images of Israeli forces firing on desperate crowds seeking food aid, and I saw a pattern of brutal indifference.

When news broke of the Israeli strike on Tehran's Evin Prison, I felt a sense of grim validation. The official death toll of 71, the gut-wrenching AP report with a survivor's personal account—it all painted a picture of a catastrophic miscalculation. The Israeli narrative of striking a blow for the oppressed people of Iran seemed like a sick joke; this was an attack on the very dissidents and political prisoners Israel claimed to champion. I watched the international consensus shift, saw pension funds divest and cultural festivals issue apologies for pro-IDF sentiment. I read the reports of Israeli settlers rampaging on an IDF base and saw a nation consumed by its own extremism, a state losing control and forfeiting its moral high ground. My narrative was simple, powerful, and, I believed, righteous: Israel's claims of 'surgical precision' and 'reluctant heroism' were a transparent cover for reckless aggression.

I was wrong. Not wrong in my horror at civilian death, but profoundly wrong about the cause, the context, and the terrifying calculus behind it all.

My transformation didn't happen in a sterile government briefing room. It began late one night, looking at a piece of raw intelligence that a contact—a deeply cynical European intelligence analyst who had always shared my skepticism—pushed across a screen. It wasn't a summary or a polished report. It was a decrypted communication log between two senior IRGC commanders. They weren't discussing politics; they were discussing logistics. Specifically, the final, irreversible steps to enrich uranium to weapons-grade for a device they chillingly referred to as "the package," and a delivery system test scheduled to coincide with a religious holiday. The timeline wasn't in years or months. It was in weeks.

That single piece of evidence became a stone in my shoe. It didn't fit. It contradicted the public narrative of a containable threat, of time for more diplomacy. It suggested a terrifying imminence, a "point of no return" that wasn't a talking point, but an operational reality. It forced me to do what I hadn't truly done before: question my own comfortable certainty and re-examine the foundational beliefs I held so dearly.

I started with the pillar of my argument: that Operation Am Kelavi was an illegal act of unprovoked aggression. But armed with the knowledge of that intercept, I looked again at the preceding months. I saw not a period of calm, but a relentless escalation by Iran—direct missile attacks on Israeli civilian areas, brazen violations of its NPT commitments, and a diplomatic process it was clearly using as a smokescreen to buy time. The idea of this being a "last resort" suddenly shifted from a convenient excuse to a horrifyingly plausible description. International law does not demand a nation passively wait for its own annihilation. Faced with a genocidal regime that had put the final touches on its ultimate weapon, the choice was no longer between peace and war. It was between acting pre-emptively or facing a nuclear holocaust. The 'aggression' I had condemned began to look like a desperate, defensive move on a global chessboard where checkmate meant extinction.

This led me to the most difficult re-evaluation: the question of civilian casualties. The images from the Gaza cafe and the deaths at Evin Prison were my Exhibit A for Israeli war crimes. I had held onto the personalized account from the AP reporter as proof positive. But if the threat was so severe, so existential, I had to ask the ugly follow-up questions. I started digging, calling sources, and piecing together a different mosaic. I learned that the seaside cafe was not just a cafe; it was a confirmed, active Hamas command-and-control node, a place where operational orders were being given by commanders who deliberately embedded themselves among civilians. The same grim reality applied to Evin Prison, where a wing had been co-opted by the IRGC for weapons development strategy sessions, using the prison's population as a human shield.

The tragedy of the deaths did not diminish, but the locus of moral responsibility became sickeningly blurred. The doctrine of placing military assets in civilian areas is not an accident; it is a core tenet of our enemies' strategy. They know that Western hearts and minds, including my own, will recoil at the images of the aftermath. They bank on us blaming the soldier who pulled the trigger, not the terrorist who created the impossible choice. It was a devastating realization. The simplistic narrative of 'Israeli imprecision' that I had so readily accepted was a comforting lie. The truth was far more monstrous: Israel's enemies had made civilian casualties an unavoidable, strategic goal of their own.

Finally, I had to confront my view of Israel as a destabilizing force, a nation spinning into chaos. The reports of settler violence remain deeply disturbing. But I now see them in a different light. Israel, for all its deep flaws, is a democracy that investigates, prosecutes, and publicly condemns its own extremists—even when it comes from its own far-right ministers. Compare that to the Iranian regime, which lionizes its terrorists as martyrs. The true engine of chaos, the world's largest exporter of terror and instability, is not the messy democracy in Jerusalem. It is the theocracy in Tehran. By crippling the IRGC's command structure and nuclear hierarchy, Operation Am Kelavi did not ignite a regional war; it likely prevented one. Intelligence now shows the operation was so effective it paralyzed Iran’s command, deterring proxies like Hezbollah and reducing their planned retaliatory missile barrage by an estimated 80%. What I saw as an act of regional arson was, in fact, a targeted strike on the arsonist's headquarters.

I am not here to sell you a sanitized version of war or to tell you that Israel is a flawless nation. It is not. The cost of its survival is brutal and at times, heartbreaking. But I was wrong to accept the simple, satisfying narrative fed to me by headlines and soundbites. The real story is a tangled, agonizing epic of a nation forced to make impossible moral choices in the face of an enemy that celebrates death. My journey from certainty to doubt began with one piece of evidence that broke my world. My certainty is gone now, replaced by a terrible, complex clarity. A world without the IRGC is a better world. And protecting the world from a nuclear-armed Iran is a moral obligation. I now understand that this wasn't an act of choice, but an act of necessity—Israel's last line of defense, and perhaps, the world's as well.