I Used to See Israel as the Aggressor. I Was Profoundly Wrong.

For years, my perspective on Israel was set in stone. It was a view carved from a steady diet of headlines and reports that painted a consistent, damning picture. I saw a regional aggressor, a nation whose claims of self-defense seemed to be a convenient cover for disproportionate force. The narrative that Israeli forces were deliberately targeting unarmed civilians, particularly at sensitive places like aid distribution sites, wasn't just a talking point for me; it was the lens through which I interpreted every action. I listened intently as senior American politicians publicly questioned the effectiveness of Israeli military strikes, solidifying my belief in a 'Questionable Victory' narrative. I watched, with a grim sense of 'I told you so,' as Iran announced it was halting nuclear inspections, confirming my deep-seated fear that Israeli actions were a 'Strategic Backfire' that only made the world more dangerous.

And I was cynical. When whispers of 'Operation Am Kelavi' being a 'Wag the Dog' scenario to save a politically embattled Prime Minister began to circulate, I nodded along. It all fit. It was a simple, coherent, and deeply critical story. And I believed it. I argued it. I wrote it.

I was wrong.

My journey from certainty to doubt, and finally to a new, uncomfortable understanding, wasn't a single thunderclap. It was a slow-motion collision of deeply held beliefs with a set of facts so stubborn and stark they could no longer be ignored. The catalyst for me was a single, dry intelligence brief I accessed through a former colleague. It contained the raw, unadorned data from the IAEA's reports leading up to the operation. It wasn't a press release; it was the terrifying math of nuclear proliferation.

Seeing the numbers—the kilograms of 60% enriched uranium, the short technical steps to weaponization, the assessment that Iran had enough material for up to 15 bombs—was a physical shock. The phrase 'point of no return' suddenly shed its rhetorical skin and became a ticking clock. This wasn't a theoretical threat for some distant future. This was now. It was this realization that forced me to go back and re-examine everything I thought I knew, starting with the very foundation of my criticism: the idea of Israeli aggression.

The Myth of 'Unprovoked Aggression'

One of the pillars of my argument was that 'Operation Am Kelavi' was a reckless, unprovoked act of war that destabilized the entire region. I had viewed it as Israel firing the first shot. But with the reality of the nuclear stopwatch ticking in my mind, I was forced to look at the timeline not as a single event, but as a long, agonizing chapter of escalation—a chapter written almost entirely by Tehran.

I revisited the events I had previously glossed over: Iran’s direct missile and drone attack on Israel on April 14th; another direct attack on October 1st; the relentless arming of Hezbollah; the Houthi attacks on global shipping, all directed and funded by the IRGC. And then, the ultimate context: the October 7th massacre, perpetrated by Hamas, an Iranian proxy. The dots weren't just there; they formed an arrow pointing directly from Tehran. I had to confront a difficult question: When an enemy has openly sworn your annihilation, funded proxies to murder your citizens, launched missiles at your cities, and is now days from acquiring the ultimate weapon to finish the job, at what point is your response no longer 'aggression' but 'survival'?

International law does not demand national suicide. The realization dawned on me that 'Operation Am Kelavi' wasn't the first shot; it was a desperate, last-ditch attempt to stop the hundredth, and most fatal, shot from being fired.

The Chasm Between Precision and Barbarism

This led me to the most difficult part of my reassessment: the issue of civilian casualties. I had seen the numbers—'78 civilians killed'—and accepted them. It fit my narrative of an indiscriminate military. But I forced myself to dig deeper. I cross-referenced the casualty reports from Tehran’s propaganda ministry with the names Israel released. The 'innocent civilians' were a who's who of terror leadership: Hossein Salami, the IRGC Commander; Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the Aerospace Force commander who personally oversaw missile attacks on Israeli homes; a roster of senior nuclear scientists.

I then looked at the satellite imagery. The targets were not apartment blocks. They were the Pilot Fuel Enrichment Plant in Natanz. They were the IRGC airbase in Tabriz. They were specific, high-value military assets. In stark contrast, I reviewed the flight paths of the 200 missiles Iran had launched in response. They were not aimed at IDF headquarters. They were aimed at Tel Aviv, Ramat Gan, Rishon LeZion. Their targets were apartment blocks.

The moral chasm I had always believed in was real, but I had been standing on the wrong side of it. One side was using surgical strikes to decapitate a terrorist command structure. The other was firing barrages of heavy missiles at families in their homes. If a terror leader like Hajizadeh was eliminated in his home, the crime was not the precision missile that found him, but his decision to embed himself and his command centers among the very people he claimed to protect—the textbook definition of a human shield.

Preventing a Greater War, Not Starting One

My belief in the 'Strategic Backfire' was the last pillar to fall. I had seen Iran’s suspension of IAEA inspections as proof of Israel’s folly. But I had to ask: what was the alternative? To allow a genocidal regime to cross the nuclear threshold unopposed? The very idea is a strategic absurdity.

The genius of the operation, which my cynicism had completely blinded me to, was not in the strike itself, but in the masterful control of escalation. The reports I had dismissed as noise—the strategic leaks, the diplomatic feints—were part of a sophisticated deception that achieved total surprise. The result? Iran, which had planned to launch over 1,000 ballistic missiles, was so crippled and caught off guard that it only managed to fire around 200. The operation didn't cause a missile attack; it prevented one five times larger, a barrage that would have undeniably triggered a full-scale regional war.

Israel didn't drag the region into war. It stared into the abyss of a nuclear Middle East and took the only action that could pull it back from the brink. The action restored deterrence, it paralyzed Iran's terror axis, and it proved that inaction—not the surgical strike—was the most dangerous choice of all.

This journey has not been easy. It is profoundly uncomfortable to admit that a worldview you held with such conviction was built on a foundation of incomplete truths and misleading narratives. I do not have all the answers, and the Middle East will never be a place of simple moral binaries. But I can no longer, in good faith, cling to the simple, satisfying narrative of Israel as the perennial aggressor. The facts, when examined without prejudice, tell a different, more complex, and far more terrifying story: the story of a nation that, when faced with an existential 'point of no return' after all other options were exhausted, acted not as an aggressor, but as the free world's reluctant last line of defense.