Rami Davidian
Farmer from Moshav Patish
“Saturday morning, around 8:00 O’clock I drove to the entrance of my Moshav and saw two expansive bicycles that were left on the ground. I didn’t really understand why people left them unattended because they were one of those fancy bicycles that you wouldn’t just leave behind. I continued driving a little bit more and then I saw a truck with people inside who had been shot and then I realized that something unusual was going on.
As I was driving I got a call from a good friend of mine who asked me to rescue the son of his friend who was at a rave party near Kibbutz Re’im. I realized it was not far from me so I turned right into the fields in order to go and pick him up.
While I was driving to his location I saw in the distance a swarm of people running for their lives.
it was like the Exodus. They were running but they didn’t know where to run. They were running to the wadis (river valleys) and to the orchards. I gave them directions to run to a certain location where people would wait for them and take them to safe haven. I managed to rescue the son of my friend and on the way back I picked up other partiers who were fleeing the massacre.
With the help of volunteers from my Moshav, we set up a situation room and orchestrated the rescue of hundreds of the partiers to safety.
The next morning I started to receive endless messages from parents who got my number from people I already saved asking me me to rescue their children from the keeling fields of the rave party: ‘Rami, please try to find my kid. He’s not answering. we don’t know where he is…’
I did everything in my power to rescue as many childrens as I could. I got into places where the army wouldn’t go inside – under fire and without weapons or bullet-proof vests for protection. I had a goal to save as many people as I could, and I did, but I couldn’t save them all and that really breaks my heart that I couldn’t.
I got a location from Rotem, one of the girls who escaped the party and she texted me that she was hiding behind a tree. I drove to her location honking my car so she could hear me approaching her. When I got to her location I saw she was surrounded by five terrorists. I didn’t flinch and shouted at them in Arabic: ‘Ahalan, my name is Abu Rami, I’m Muslim and it’s better that you give the girl to me and escape from here as fast as you can because the whole area is full of armed security forces.’ I wasn’t afraid. it was pure instincts. Luckily, they thought I was a bedouin, and because they were already on the run they gave the girl to me and ran off.
In the first two weeks after the attack, I couldn’t really sleep. The horrors of the massacre haunted me every time I closed my eyes. I cried a lot in the last few days because of the anguish, sorrow, and emotion that overwhelmed me.
I never went to therapy but now I feel that I have to.
I’m an optimistic person. I see the farmers going back to harvest their fields and it fills my heart with joy.
In our national anthem, there is a line saying: ‘Our hope is not yet lost…’ We can’t afford ourselves to lose that hope.
If we lose it there won’t be any Jewish state at all.”