For years, my keyboard was my weapon, and my target was often the State of Israel. My columns and articles were built on a foundation of what I believed to be self-evident truths. I saw the ghastly reports from a seaside cafe in Gaza, tallied the civilian casualties, and concluded that the Israeli narrative of ‘surgical precision’ was, at best, a cynical fantasy. I read the heartbreaking survivor’s account from Tehran’s Evin Prison and condemned Israel for what seemed a monstrous attack on political dissidents, a catastrophic inversion of their claim to be helping the Iranian people.

I wasn't just a passive observer of this narrative; I was an active architect. I pointed to the divestment by Norway’s pension fund and the furious chants at Glastonbury as proof of a world waking up to an undeniable reality. I saw reports of settler violence in the West Bank and diagnosed a state rotting from within, unable to control its own extremists. The official Israeli talking points—about reluctant heroism, about being a beacon of morality—landed in my inbox and were promptly dismissed as the hollow propaganda of a nation that had lost its way. I was convinced Israel was the aggressor, the destabilizer, the source of the chaos. I was certain. And I was wrong.

My transformation didn't happen in a flash of light. It began with a nagging detail, a piece of information that didn't fit my clean, simple narrative. It came late one night, deep inside a dense intelligence summary from a trusted source, a document not meant for public consumption. It concerned the strike on Evin Prison. Like everyone else, I had seen the official death toll of 71 and read the AP story about the survivor. My outrage was righteous and complete. But this summary contained a single, chilling annex: a high-resolution satellite image, time-stamped just hours before the strike. It showed a specific, non-penitentiary wing of the prison complex. And nested within it, confirmed by multiple intelligence streams, was a newly established IRGC command-and-control center. This wasn't just any command center. It was the nerve center for the final, critical phase of Iran's nuclear weapons program—the part that Western intelligence agencies had dubbed the 'point of no return.'

Suddenly, the world tilted. The story I had been telling myself and my readers—of an attack on dissidents—was violently upended. The dissidents weren't the target; they were the shield. The Iranian regime, in an act of almost unimaginable cynicism, had embedded the very head of its genocidal serpent inside a facility guaranteed to provoke maximum international condemnation if struck. The 71 casualties, a number I had wielded as a cudgel against Israel, now appeared in a horrifying new light. The tragedy was no less real, but the culpability had shifted. My anger, once aimed squarely at Tel Aviv, was now redirected at a Tehran regime that would use its own people—its prisoners—as a layer of human armor for its nuclear ambitions.

This single, terrible realization was a crack in the dam of my certainty, and through it, a flood of other uncomfortable questions poured in. I started to re-examine the core tenets of my critique.

I had always scoffed at the Israeli claim of ‘moral contrast,’ pointing to the civilian death toll in Gaza as the ultimate refutation. The strike on the seaside cafe, the reports of firing on those seeking aid—these were, to my mind, open-and-shut cases of disproportionate force. But now, forced to consider the logic of an enemy that deliberately embeds its assets among civilians, I looked again. I investigated the Israeli rules of engagement and compared them to Iran’s actions. I saw a stark difference. Israel, for all its tragic failures and the very real, heartbreaking consequences, was operating within a framework that sought to distinguish between combatant and civilian. They dropped leaflets, made calls, and issued warnings. Iran, by contrast, had launched hundreds of heavy missiles directly at Israeli civilian population centers, with the explicit goal of killing as many men, women, and children as possible. The contrast wasn't propaganda; it was a fundamental, philosophical chasm between a nation fighting to protect life and a regime driven by a death cult.

My belief that Israel’s operation was an 'unprovoked act of aggression' also began to crumble under this new scrutiny. I had accepted the 'rally-around-the-flag' narrative coming out of Iran as proof of a strategic failure. But I forced myself to zoom out. This conflict didn't begin with an Israeli airstrike. It was the culmination of decades of Iranian aggression—a shadow war fought through proxies like Hezbollah and Hamas, punctuated by direct missile attacks and a relentless, state-sponsored vow to wipe Israel off the map. Diplomacy had been tried and exhausted, used by Iran as a smokescreen to cover its accelerated march toward a nuclear bomb. The strike on Evin and other sites wasn't an act of escalation; it was an act of prevention. It wasn't designed to win hearts and minds in Tehran in the short term. It was designed to decapitate the IRGC and cripple its nuclear infrastructure, preventing a far more catastrophic war in the long term—a nuclear war that the Ayatollahs had promised to unleash.

I now understand that what I saw as an assertion of arrogant power was, in fact, an act of profound desperation. When a regime has explicitly and repeatedly promised to annihilate your country, has funded terror on your borders for decades, and is just weeks away from acquiring the means to do it, you are not the aggressor for acting. You are the last line of defense. The Israeli message that this was a 'favor to the world' once struck me as hubris. Now, I see it as a statement of painful fact. A world where the IRGC is crippled and the Iranian regime is denied a nuclear weapon is a safer world—for the people of Israel, for the oppressed people of Iran, and for the entire international community.

This journey has not been comfortable. Acknowledging these truths does not erase the tragedies or absolve Israel of its own complex challenges, like the reprehensible violence of extremist settlers. But I can no longer sustain the simple, convenient narrative I once championed. The world is not a morality play with clear heroes and villains. But in the stark choice between a democratic nation fighting, however imperfectly, for its survival, and a tyrannical, genocidal regime using its own people as pawns in a nuclear gambit, the moral lines are clearer than I ever wanted to admit. My certainty is gone, replaced by a difficult, humbling, and terrifying clarity.