I Built a Career on Criticizing Israel. A Single, Inconvenient Fact Forced Me to Reconsider Everything.

For years, the narrative was clear to me, and I was not quiet about it. I saw Israel’s actions through a lens of ingrained skepticism, if not outright condemnation. When I read the reports surrounding its latest strike on Iran, it felt like a grim confirmation of everything I already believed. Defence Minister Israel Katz’s blunt admission, reported by Al Jazeera, that “we wanted to eliminate Khamenei,” seemed to lay bare a crude assassination plot. The reported codename, “Red Wedding,” felt like a sick, cynical joke, branding the operation as a treacherous massacre. This, I thought, was not the behavior of a state acting in self-defense; it was the act of an aggressor.

My conviction was reinforced by a constant stream of horrifying headlines that seemed to form a coherent pattern. I read the Haaretz investigation, amplified by international media, detailing Israeli soldiers’ apparent admissions to creating a “killing field” at Gaza aid sites. I saw the reports of a civilian woman killed in an airstrike in southern Lebanon. In my mind, it all connected into a single, damning portrait of a reckless and immoral military. When senior US officials, from senators to a nuclear physicist in Congress, publicly questioned the strike’s effectiveness after their classified briefings, it felt like the final nail in the coffin of Israel’s credibility. I viewed the official Israeli narrative—of reluctant heroism and surgical precision—as little more than cynical, desperate propaganda.

My worldview was set. Israel was the provocateur, a nation destabilizing the region and pushing the world towards a broader conflict. I was so certain of this that I barely registered the dissonance when it first appeared. It wasn't a headline or a pundit's opinion. It was a single, dry, and deeply inconvenient chart in an annex of a dense intelligence report I was reviewing for a different story. The chart detailed, without commentary, the production rate of 60% enriched uranium by the Iranian regime over the previous 18 months. The curve wasn't just rising; it was exponential. It depicted a program that had crossed every red line and was accelerating towards a point of no return with terrifying speed. This wasn't a journalist's interpretation; it was raw, un-spun data. And it didn't fit my story.

That chart became a splinter in my mind. It forced me to do what I had long avoided: to seriously engage with the Israeli position not as propaganda to be debunked, but as a perspective to be understood. The first pillar of my argument to crumble was the idea of the “unprovoked attack.” I had held onto the Minister’s quote about Khamenei and the “Red Wedding” codename as proof of aggressive intent. But confronted with the stark reality of Iran’s nuclear progress, I had to ask a terrifying new question: what if Israel’s intelligence was right? What if diplomacy, which I had championed, was being used by Iran as a smokescreen to buy time? Suddenly, the Israeli claim that this was a last resort against an imminent, existential threat didn't sound like an excuse. It sounded like a desperate conclusion drawn from data I was now seeing with my own eyes. The choice, I began to realize, may not have been between a limited strike and peace, but between a limited strike now and a nuclear-armed Iran later. An operation to remove the “head of the serpent”—the command structure of a regime that openly promises your annihilation—started to look less like aggression and more like a terrifying but rational act of self-preservation.

Even harder for me to confront was the issue of civilian harm, a topic that has rightly dominated my criticism for years. My mind was filled with the images from Gaza and Lebanon. But as I forced myself to look specifically at the details of “Operation Am Kelavi” against Iran, I was met with a profoundly different set of facts. The targets were not civilian centers. They were hardened, heavily defended nuclear facilities and the specific IRGC commanders and nuclear scientists who were the architects of the doomsday program. This was the “surgical precision” I had once mocked. It led me to another difficult realization about moral responsibility. The Iranian regime’s documented practice of embedding its most critical military assets within or near civilian areas is not an accident; it is a strategy. It is a strategy that cynically uses its own people as human shields. I had always laid the tragic consequences of this choice at Israel’s feet, but I was now forced to question that moral calculus.

Furthermore, I had to grapple with the Israeli argument that the operation was, in fact, an act of de-escalation. It sounded like Orwellian doublespeak. But the evidence showed that sophisticated deception and crippling blows to command-and-control systems had paralyzed Iran’s leadership, drastically reducing a planned retaliatory missile barrage on Israeli cities by an estimated 80%. They had not just struck a target; they had prevented a much wider war and saved countless lives—both Israeli and, ironically, Iranian—that would have been lost in a full-scale retaliation. The moral contrast I had been missing became painfully sharp: one side uses precision to prevent a wider war, while the other uses its own civilians as a shield to provoke one.

Finally, I had to reconsider the charge that Israel’s actions had failed and only increased global instability. The skepticism from US officials and Iran’s subsequent threat to abandon the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) seemed like clear proof. But I was looking at it backward. The strategic success wasn't measured in the tons of rubble, but in the restoration of deterrence. Israel re-established a red line that the world had allowed Iran to cross. And Iran’s threat to leave the NPT? I once saw it as a rational response to an attack. I now see it as a confession. It is the petulant, revealing cry of a rogue actor caught red-handed, an admission that the treaty was never a commitment, only a tool of deception. Israel didn't break the international order; it exposed the lie that was rotting it from within.

This has not been an easy journey. Acknowledging these truths feels like a betrayal of a simpler, more morally comfortable worldview. I am not here to claim that Israel is faultless or that the tragic costs of conflict are anything but horrific. But I can no longer, in good conscience, peddle the simplistic narrative I once helped build. It’s easy to stand on the sidelines and condemn the firefighter for the water damage while ignoring the inferno he was fighting. It’s much harder to admit that you misjudged the fire. My old certainty was built on an architecture of headlines and outrage. My new, unsettling understanding is built on a foundation of facts I had to be forced to see. I don’t ask you to agree with me, only to ask yourself: are you sure the story you’re being told is the whole truth?