Run East

This is a story I heard in Israel. I have been carrying it around since, and I want to write it down while I still have the order of it right, as close to the way it was told to me as I can get.

His name is Atir. He survived the Nova festival.

What happened

When the attack began, the first thing Atir did was make sure his eighteen friends got into cars and had a way to get home. Not himself. Them, first.

Afterward, he and one friend hitched a ride toward Tel Aviv. By that point the traffic was already building, because everyone was trying to get north at the same time. When the car came to a stop, Atir got out to see what was happening.

The first person he found was an injured girl, and he stopped to help her. Then an armed security guard from the festival, with multiple bullet wounds in his chest, screamed at them: "There are terrorists! Run east!"

So they ran east, into the fields.

As they were running, the person in front of Atir turned sharply to the right. Atir decided to keep going straight, along the bushes. I do not know what happened to the person who turned right.

By the time they stopped they were severely dehydrated. They came across six other people, one girl and five boys, and the eight of them kept going together.

At some point they spotted a farm, and on it a person whose face was covered. Afraid he might be a terrorist, they ran around the farm and argued about what to do. They needed water badly. They were also terrified of walking straight into something worse than what they had just run from. Then they saw a farmer riding a bike toward the farm, and they waited to hear gunshots. They heard nothing. They decided to take the risk.

Unis

The farmer was a Bedouin Muslim man named Unis.

Unis brought them into a house. He gave them food and water and let them rest in the air conditioning. They started charging their phones and calling their families to tell them they were alive.

Then Unis came to them and said, "The terrorists are here. Go hide."

The house was elevated. The eight of them got underneath it.

The terrorists came and confronted Unis and demanded to know where the Jews were. Unis told them there were none there.

I want to be specific about what that sentence cost, because it is easy to read past it. There were around twenty other farmers on the property. Unis has six children of his own. He was standing on his own land, in front of armed men, lying to their faces about eight strangers lying in the dirt a few feet away. He knew exactly what he was putting at risk, and he said it anyway, and then he begged and pleaded with them until they finally left.

Only then could Atir and the other seven come out from under the house.

The next day, Atir and his friend reported for reserve duty.

Why I wanted to write it down

I keep thinking about the person who turned right. Same field, same second, same terror, and one person goes right and one goes straight, and there is no lesson in that. It is just how it happened. A lot of that day is like that.

But Unis is not that. Unis is not luck. Unis is a decision, made by one person, in the worst possible conditions, with everything he had on the line.

I think we are trained to look for the big explanation. The politics, the history, the map. And then you hear a story like this one and the whole thing comes down to a farmer on a bike deciding what kind of person he is going to be in the next ten minutes.

Unis, a Bedouin Muslim farmer, risked his own life and the safety of his family and his six children to protect eight Jewish strangers he had never met.

He saved Atir's life. I did not want the story to just sit in my head, so it is here now.