Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / PREVIEW: Oct. 7th Survivor Natalie Sanandaji

Transcript

PREVIEW: Oct. 7th Survivor Natalie Sanandaji · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  G'day, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
• 0:06
  And it's undoubtedly one of the most dangerous ideas in the history of the world.
• 0:11
  Jew hatred, ah, sniveling little Jews, they're too rich, they're too poor, they're too conniving,
• 0:17
  they're too powerful, they're too weak, they're just, they're just not quite right.
• 0:20
  And it's tricky to understand what the difference is between Jew hatred and criticism of
• 0:26
  Israel, which is not Jew hatred, criticism of the occupation, which is not Jew hatred,
• 0:29
  criticism of the Gaza war, which is not Jew hatred, criticism even of the idea of
• 0:34
  there being a religious ethno state in the Middle East, especially for Jews.
• 0:39
  I wouldn't say that's Jew hatred either. You know what is Jew hatred?
• 0:44
  When you are a pro Nazi, jihadist death cult in the 21st century,
• 0:52
  massacring and slaughtering Jews, I think that fits the bill.
• 0:58
  And that's what happened on October 7, 2023, and that's what happened to today's guests.
• 1:04
  The borderline cases of anti-Semitism are interesting to me and really genuinely hard to wrestle with.
• 1:11
  I mean, my country of Australia is currently got its pants on fire
• 1:16
  about this scandal involving a couple of nurses who apparently at a Sydney hospital
• 1:22
  were on a kind of a chat roulette internet chat site and an Israeli blogger and influencer
• 1:29
  seems to have got them to say some pretty horrendously anti-Israeli things.
• 1:35
  They're boasting about refusing to treat Israelis, they're boasting about killing Israeli patients.
• 1:42
  The reality is we just don't know what was going on.
• 1:45
  This is just a piece of video. It's obviously horrendous if they meant what they were saying.
• 1:50
  Do we know whether or not they were baited into saying that? Do we understand the context?
• 1:54
  No, I'll read out what they said and we play it during this conversation
• 1:59
  because I wanted to get not only thoughts about it, but in case this is the first time you're coming across this
• 2:04
  or you've just sort of bumped into it casually on social media.
• 2:07
  There's this footage of these nurses, they're in scrubs.
• 2:11
  One of them says, I'm so upset that you're Israeli.
• 2:14
  Like, eventually you're going to get killed and the guy, the Israeli interlocutor,
• 2:18
  says, well, why am I going to get killed?
• 2:20
  And then the female nurse comes into screen and says, it's Palestine's country,
• 2:25
  not your country, your piece of shit.
• 2:27
  One day your time will come and you will die the most.
• 2:30
  Listen to me. She says, when your time comes, I want you to remember my face
• 2:34
  so you can understand that you will die the most disgusting death.
• 2:37
  I mean, these are heated remarks have reasonable people sometimes been goaded
• 2:44
  into making ridiculous statements potentially.
• 2:48
  Anyway, I'm bending over backwards to be as generous as possible here
• 2:52
  because I want to be someone like, you know, right wing blowhard,
• 2:55
  who sees anti-traumatism around every corner, but the Israeli guy says,
• 2:59
  would you treat an Israeli person in the hospital?
• 3:02
  And she cuts him off, says, I won't treat them, I'll kill them.
• 3:06
  Not God forbid I hope to God.
• 3:09
  And then the other nurse responds to a question which the Israeli makes
• 3:14
  about whether an Israeli person would be treated by them by saying,
• 3:16
  you have no idea how many Israeli dogs came to this hospital
• 3:20
  and I literally sent them to the afterlife.
• 3:22
  And he slices his hand across his neck.
• 3:27
  This nurse apparently fled from Afghanistan to Australia with his family
• 3:31
  as a teenager or just before he was a teenager.
• 3:34
  And according to social media, he became an Australian citizen a few years ago.
• 3:39
  And this is now sparking a whole conversation about needles to say,
• 3:43
  are we importing the good people into this country?
• 3:46
  And should there be any mechanism by which we determine if people hold values
• 3:51
  of pluralism, justice, multi-ethnic, multicultural society, free from bigotry?
• 4:00
  This guy was also found on the internet.
• 4:04
  There's a resurfaced clip of him leading a mosque in a martyrdom prayer.
• 4:10
  This was months before he accepted his citizenship as Australian citizenship
• 4:14
  and his brother apparently uploaded this video to YouTube in 2020.
• 4:18
  So I was 27 at the time and he's passionately singing a martyrdom prayer
• 4:26
  to one of the martyrdom of Hussein Ibn Ali in the fabled Battle of Kabbalah.
• 4:33
  We don't know whether or not these people are just talking shit.
• 4:36
  Some people are saying, oh my goodness, how could you even trust going into a hospital
• 4:41
  and whether or not these people are going to kill you while you're there?
• 4:45
  The fact is we just don't know. We don't know what they said.
• 4:48
  Well, we don't know what they meant by what they said.
• 4:51
  One thing that I do find hilarious in all of this is the statement put out
• 4:55
  by the Australian nursing and midwifery federation.
• 4:59
  So the shit hits the fan and get this.
• 5:03
  They release a statement condemning anti-semitism.
• 5:06
  Do you think they can just condemn anti-semitism and say that there is no place for a Jew hatred
• 5:11
  in their organization? Of course they can't just do that.
• 5:15
  They have to soften it by throwing in Islamophobia.
• 5:19
  This is like, if you're not Jewish, let me just say,
• 5:27
  over the course of the past few decades, certainly the past decade,
• 5:32
  the social justice reckoning of the 2010s and early 2020s,
• 5:38
  we have all come to agree that people in privileged positions, positions of power
• 5:44
  should not tell minorities what they're allowed to find offensive.
• 5:49
  It's up to the minority to members of the minority community
• 5:52
  to basically say, look, I find that a little bit demeaning,
• 5:55
  and I'd rather you didn't speak that way.
• 5:58
  The person who's saying the offensive thing no longer gets to turn around and go,
• 6:02
  no, no, no, I'm not being offensive.
• 6:04
  No, I mean, you know, just because I slapped your ass and call you tuts in the office,
• 6:09
  in the workplace, that doesn't mean I'm being sexist.
• 6:12
  I've got daughters. I'm not sexist.
• 6:15
  You can't do that anymore.
• 6:17
  The woman is allowed to say, no, slapping me on the ass and calling me tuts is sexist
• 6:21
  because I find it sexist, I find it demeaning.
• 6:23
  I can smell something that you can't smell.
• 6:27
  That's a legitimate move now.
• 6:29
  Unless the minority is a Jew.
• 6:34
  Jews don't get to say that. Jews don't count.
• 6:38
  So when a Jew, he is a person in a position, in a leadership position,
• 6:45
  who is sort of dragged kicking and screaming to come out in support of the Jewish community
• 6:51
  or at least just in support of them not being killed or mocked or, you know,
• 6:56
  the subjects of hate speech.
• 6:58
  And when that person cannot simply plainly say that expressing hatred towards Jews is bad,
• 7:05
  but feels the need to add to throw in the qualifier that Islamophobia is also bad,
• 7:13
  we smell a rat.
• 7:15
  It just smells off.
• 7:17
  It smells like you can't bring yourself in a context like saying all lives matter
• 7:22
  instead of black lives matter.
• 7:23
  Like what we're talking about here is violence from police against the black community.
• 7:27
  Black lives matter.
• 7:28
  And then you go, actually, all lives matter.
• 7:30
  Yeah, all lives do matter.
• 7:31
  We're talking about black people right now.
• 7:34
  That was always a dick move.
• 7:36
  And it's no less of a dick when the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation does it.
• 7:40
  Allow me to read their statement on New South Wales Hospital Anti-Semitic Video.
• 7:44
  They've rushed this out.
• 7:47
  The Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation, ANMF,
• 7:50
  condemns all forms of racism, bigotry, and hatred,
• 7:54
  including acts of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.
• 7:59
  What acts of Islamophobia?
• 8:01
  Nobody's talking about acts of Islamophobia.
• 8:03
  There have been no recorded acts of Islamophobia lately.
• 8:06
  Quite apart from the fact that Islam is a set of ideas.
• 8:08
  It's a belief.
• 8:09
  It's not a group of people.
• 8:11
  Like, if there is an instance in which an Arab is a victim of a hate crime,
• 8:17
  and an organization is called upon to come out and defend the Arab community,
• 8:23
  it doesn't have a problem coming out and saying,
• 8:26
  we condemn all forms of...
• 8:28
  It doesn't even need to say all forms of bigotry.
• 8:30
  It just needs to say, we condemn anti-Arab bigotry, we condemn Islamophobia.
• 8:34
  It doesn't then feel the need to go on and say,
• 8:36
  we condemn all forms of Islamophobia and Jew hatred.
• 8:41
  Where did the Jew hatred come from?
• 8:43
  We're not talking about Jews at the moment.
• 8:44
  We're talking about this was an anti-Arab or an anti-Muslim attack.
• 8:49
  It's the only instance.
• 8:52
  Jew hatred is the only instance in which nobody feels that they can quite just state that it's wrong,
• 8:58
  without also clearing their throat about how wrong
• 9:02
  X, Y, Z, A, B, C, Delta, Bravo, Papa also are.
• 9:09
  The Australian Jewish Association noticed this incongruity
• 9:14
  in the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation's statement
• 9:18
  and said since and posted on Twitter.
• 9:20
  Since 7 October 2023, we have seen leftist nursing organizations
• 9:24
  do nothing about the anti-Israel anti-Semitism in their midst.
• 9:28
  Jewish hospital staff and patients have been harassed
• 9:31
  as a result of your complicity.
• 9:33
  These are the nurses union essentially.
• 9:35
  And the nurses union had photos all over their web pages
• 9:38
  and on the hospitals of nurses wearing cuffiers
• 9:41
  and pro-palafry palestine t-shirts and all this.
• 9:43
  It's all great. It's all a big laugh, right?
• 9:45
  I mean, who doesn't like not killing babies?
• 9:46
  Great, good for you.
• 9:47
  And the Australian Jewish Association went on to call the union
• 9:50
  a shameful disgrace.
• 9:53
  Now again, I'm being maximally generous to these two nurses
• 9:56
  because I know how the initial aftermath of the social media
• 10:00
  shift storm can sometimes reach conclusions
• 10:03
  and can demonize people that are unwarranted.
• 10:06
  So I don't know what went on.
• 10:08
  We haven't seen the full video.
• 10:09
  I don't know what the context was.
• 10:12
  The reason why today's conversation is so useful
• 10:14
  is because it requires no context.
• 10:17
  It may be the case that these nurses hate Israelis and hate Jews.
• 10:22
  It may not be the case.
• 10:25
  But today's guest, Natalie Senandarji,
• 10:29
  is someone who has come face to face with people who are serious,
• 10:33
  who really are serious about Jew hatred.
• 10:38
  Hamas aren't mucking around.
• 10:41
  They're not being caught on a hidden camera or on chat roulette.
• 10:46
  They're not being taken out of context.
• 10:48
  They're quite proud.
• 10:50
  They're quite clear.
• 10:52
  They follow through.
• 10:54
  And Natalie was there when they did.
• 10:57
  At the Nova Music Festival in Israel on October 7th, 2023.
• 11:06
  Natalie is a Jewish Iranian American, grew up in New York City.
• 11:13
  Her mum is Israeli.
• 11:15
  Her dad is Iranian.
• 11:17
  Her mum learned Farsi.
• 11:19
  They spoke a combination of Hebrew and English and Farsi in the home.
• 11:23
  So she's a wonderful, eclectic, multicultural mix
• 11:27
  who understands what it's like to be oppressed,
• 11:31
  not just by one regime, but by many,
• 11:34
  and to find freedom in the new world.
• 11:37
  She and I discuss mostly, almost exclusively,
• 11:40
  really her experience that day,
• 11:42
  because I think it's just a fascinating story
• 11:44
  telling apart from anything else.
• 11:46
  She uses her experience as a way to advocate for the combat
• 11:50
  anti-Semitism movement.
• 11:52
  We discuss the Gaza War, the Israeli occupation,
• 11:54
  hatred, and love.
• 11:56
  And of course, the Nova Music Festival.
• 11:59
  Please enjoy as much as I did,
• 12:01
  or not only Natalie Sanandaji.
• 12:06
  So my mum spoke to me in Hebrew growing up.
• 12:10
  And I would say most kids of Israeli parents in America,
• 12:14
  understand Hebrew, but they don't speak it that much,
• 12:16
  because they tend to answer their parents in English,
• 12:19
  because when you're a kid, it feels unequal
• 12:21
  to not speak the language of the country that you're in.
• 12:25
  But I was obsessed with Israel,
• 12:29
  like all my favorite childhood memories in the summers were in Israel.
• 12:32
  So I was very obsessed with speaking the language
• 12:34
  and like, perfecting it and trying to perfect my accent.
• 12:37
  So I always spoke to my mum in Hebrew,
• 12:39
  and I speak fluent in Hebrew,
• 12:41
  but I do still have like a slight accent.
• 12:44
  And my mum, who's really good with languages,
• 12:47
  she learned Farsi when she moved to America, actually.
• 12:51
  And so her and my father spoke Farsi to each other
• 12:53
  when they didn't know, want me to know what they were saying.
• 12:56
  I started to pick up on Farsi, though, through context clues.
• 13:00
  And until the age of like 10,
• 13:02
  I didn't tell them that I understood Farsi,
• 13:04
  and I would just sit there and listen to their conversations.
• 13:06
  Like, pretend like I don't know what's going on.
• 13:08
  And then one time when I was like 10,
• 13:10
  they like said something insulting about me and I was really pissed.
• 13:13
  So I was like, okay, either I blow my cover
• 13:15
  and I tell them that I'm mad,
• 13:16
  or I don't tell them that I'm mad.
• 13:18
  And I'm like, okay, I have to tell them I'm mad.
• 13:20
  So I blew my cover and I told my mum, like, by the way,
• 13:22
  I understand Farsi, she was shocked.
• 13:25
  She was like, my god, my daughter's a spy.
• 13:27
  Don't think you can get into the past a kid.
• 13:29
  I mean, kids pick up languages so quickly.
• 13:31
  Yeah, they'll say that.
• 13:32
  Kids are way smarter than we give them credit for.
• 13:34
  And it's funny because we were kids once.
• 13:36
  You would think that we remember being that smart.
• 13:39
  But a lot of people forget how smart kids actually are.
• 13:42
  I mean, your own pace of mental acuity
• 13:45
  just feels normal regardless of what pace it is, right?
• 13:48
  I mean, a person who's very slow or very dumb
• 13:50
  or is suffering dementia thinks that they're still sharp.
• 13:53
  I mean, you know, once they get to a certain point
• 13:55
  at which they no longer realize what their limitations are.
• 13:58
  Everything's subjective.
• 13:59
  You can't get out of your own head.
• 14:01
  So you don't have any yardstick to measure it by.
• 14:04
  So you were going to Israel for holidays when you were a kid.
• 14:08
  Were you visiting family there or what was your relationship
• 14:11
  to Israel as a child and adolescent?
• 14:14
  Yeah, we, my mother and I, we went to Israel almost every year
• 14:20
  my entire life, sometimes even twice a year.
• 14:23
  Whether it was for the holidays or just for the summer,
• 14:27
  for like two or three months or for family occasion,
• 14:32
  like a wedding.
• 14:33
  So I really spent a good amount of my childhood in Israel.
• 14:38
  And when did you first live there?
• 14:40
  I actually never lived in Israel.
• 14:42
  Oh, interesting.
• 14:43
  Okay. So how long had you been?
• 14:44
  Which people find surprising?
• 14:46
  What was the longest stretch that you had there prior to October 7th?
• 14:50
  I would say like three months to three and a half months for like the summer.
• 14:55
  You can get away with saying that you lived somewhere
• 14:57
  if it's more than 90 days.
• 14:58
  That's what I claim.
• 15:00
  Can you?
• 15:01
  Yeah.
• 15:02
  I don't know.
• 15:03
  In New York, in order to be considered a New Yorker,
• 15:05
  it's like actually like, be like a proper New Yorker.
• 15:08
  You have to be living there for like 10 years or not.
• 15:10
  I think that's right.
• 15:11
  New Yorker Bay is a different logic because there are so many,
• 15:13
  I tinder into people that we become possessive.
• 15:15
  Yeah, I did 12 years in New York actually until,
• 15:19
  okay, then you can close up.
• 15:20
  So a few years ago.
• 15:21
  And like, yes, I wear a, it's a badge of pride.
• 15:23
  I'm like, I'm not one of these fly-by-nighters
• 15:25
  who just came and lived in Park Slope for 18 months.
• 15:27
  Thank you very much.
• 15:28
  Yeah.
• 15:29
  So why were you in Israel this time around in 2023?
• 15:35
  So I went specifically for a friend's wedding,
• 15:38
  which actually took place about two weeks before the Nova
• 15:42
  Festival happened.
• 15:44
  And I ended up extending to be with friends and family
• 15:47
  for the holidays because Sukkot was coming up,
• 15:51
  which was the holiday during that time.
• 15:56
  And I was planning on staying longer.
• 15:58
  I ended up, you know, by the time Nova happened
• 16:01
  and by the time I left, I cut my trip short,
• 16:04
  but I was planning on staying much longer.
• 16:06
  Okay.
• 16:07
  And so you're there for a wedding.
• 16:08
  Have a good wedding.
• 16:09
  It comes up that you can go to this dance party.
• 16:11
  Will you enter like,
• 16:13
  like, psychedelic trance scene?
• 16:16
  So I, I was varying to sidetrance,
• 16:18
  but unfortunately, New York has.
• 16:22
  Cy trance is what cool people call psychedelic trance.
• 16:25
  People who don't know.
• 16:26
  Do you want to just explain what psychedelic trance is
• 16:28
  to the uncool ones like me?
• 16:31
  I guess I would describe it as.
• 16:34
  It's under the umbrella of electronic music or house music.
• 16:38
  And it's one of the genres with the higher,
• 16:42
  the highest BPMs, which is beats per minute.
• 16:45
  That and I think I would say like techno or like hard techno,
• 16:49
  the highest BPMs.
• 16:51
  And sidetrance or psychedelic trance has a lot of.
• 16:58
  I guess a lot of influence from like Indian culture.
• 17:01
  Like there's like Goa trance,
• 17:03
  which is named after Goa, which is in India.
• 17:07
  And if you listen to like a lot of the lyrics that are inside trance songs,
• 17:11
  it tends to be in, I guess, Hindu.
• 17:16
  And Hindi, sorry.
• 17:18
  Yeah, it's, it's a very hyperactive music,
• 17:22
  but I would say to anyone who knows what techno is,
• 17:26
  I would, I always call sidetrance happy techno.
• 17:30
  The techno could be very kind of like dark and aggressive.
• 17:33
  And it's the types of sounds that they use can feel almost like demonic,
• 17:37
  in a sense.
• 17:38
  And sidetrance feels very light and very.
• 17:45
  When you're dancing in the woods in like what we call in Israel a nature party,
• 17:50
  which nature parties tend to happen either in the woods or in the desert,
• 17:53
  obviously somewhere outdoors in nature.
• 17:56
  When you're listening to sidetrance music and dancing to it in the woods,
• 18:00
  you feel like you're in a fairy tale.
• 18:02
  It's just like very happy, very uplifting.
• 18:05
  And yeah, I guess like that's how I would describe it to someone who doesn't know what it is.
• 18:09
  And does the psychedelic wood in psychedelic trance imply that this is frequently associated
• 18:13
  with psychedelic drums?
• 18:16
  Or is that the nature of the music that the music is psychedelic?
• 18:21
  The music is psychedelic.
• 18:23
  It's it's like the sounds that are being used in it.
• 18:26
  But I would say that the nature of the people who like sidetrance parties,
• 18:33
  they tend to be very hippie-ish.
• 18:35
  And out of all the like house music genres,
• 18:38
  I would say the sidetrance audience or yeah, like the audience people who go to the events,
• 18:48
  they tend to be most often compared to like the people of Woodstock,
• 18:53
  like very hippie-ish, dancing with no shoes on, like very friendly.
• 18:59
  I get it.
• 19:01
  They're feasting on magic mushrooms and hugging trees.
• 19:04
  Yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 19:06
  And that's something I talk a lot about when I talk about Nova itself.
• 19:11
  I always try to explain to people like the type of people that were at the festival.
• 19:16
  A week before that I was at a different festival that was like techno and tech house and like other different genres.
• 19:22
  And some of these other genres can attract more I guess like snobby crowd or kind of like standoffish crowd.
• 19:32
  And when I arrived at that other festival, I was the only girl coming with a group of guy friends
• 19:37
  that were meeting up with other girlfriends and theirs.
• 19:40
  And I remember these other girls right away were very standoffish towards me.
• 19:44
  It's like a typical like stuck up type of behavior.
• 19:48
  Yeah, I'm too cool.
• 19:49
  I'm too cool for you guys because I'm the music aficionado here just enjoying my beats.
• 19:54
  And in front of my face, these other girls were like,
• 19:57
  why'd you bring this other girl here?
• 19:59
  Who is she?
• 20:00
  Like what is she doing here?
• 20:01
  And then I remember when I came to the Nova festival,
• 20:04
  it was the same situation and I was a little cautious at first because I was worried about
• 20:09
  how these girls are going to react to me.
• 20:11
  And right away they were so loving and they were like,
• 20:14
  hi, what's your name?
• 20:15
  Have a snack?
• 20:16
  Have a drink?
• 20:17
  Like where are you from?
• 20:18
  And it was just like a completely different crowd.
• 20:21
  Was it had it been billed as a piece festival?
• 20:26
  Yeah, I would say a lot of side trans festivals,
• 20:30
  like kind of categorizing themselves under the theme of like peace and love and unity.
• 20:37
  And it really matches the type of people that kind of are attracted to the side trans music.
• 20:43
  And would peace in that context mean global world universal peace in some kind of grand spiritual way?
• 20:50
  Or would it be a reference specifically to the situation in Israel and Palestine?
• 20:56
  I would say it's like more global.
• 20:58
  Right.
• 20:59
  Because it's also it's a very, this type of music attracts a very global crowd.
• 21:04
  Like even the crowd at the Nova Festival was not just Israelis.
• 21:08
  Because I saw reports after the massacre of people saying like,
• 21:12
  and the people, you know, the victims here, these were peace nicks,
• 21:15
  these were people who would have been the first people to struggle towards some kind of an accommodation,
• 21:21
  you know, who would have opposed settlement building and who would have opposed the occupation and so on.
• 21:25
  As if to say that had they been liquid nicks,
• 21:28
  it would have been okay to, you know, slaughter them.
• 21:32
  So I think, well, yeah, obviously that's a ridiculous way to look at it.
• 21:38
  But, but I think when people were referring to that,
• 21:40
  they were referring to the people in the people in the people's team.
• 21:43
  So I would say that I think people were referring specifically to the people who lived in the people's team,
• 21:49
  who were murdered on that day because a lot of them were people that would go into Gaza,
• 21:56
  like to the border and drive children from Gaza to the hospitals in Israel.
• 22:01
  The people in the people team were very much people that really wanted to be at peace with our neighbors
• 22:09
  and did a lot of charity work in order to help our neighbors in Gaza.
• 22:13
  And for people who don't know the history of the Kibbutzim,
• 22:16
  these are small sort of semi-socialists, universalists, peace-loving communities of sharing and cooperation and community, right?
• 22:25
  Yeah.
• 22:26
  So I think a lot of the time when people were like referring to that,
• 22:29
  it was more so specifically to the people in the people in the people's team because they,
• 22:32
  it's almost ironic that they were the ones to get attacked when they are out of all the population of Israel,
• 22:39
  the most pro helping the gossens and being there for your neighbors.
• 22:44
  Right.
• 22:45
  So it's a sad type of irony.
• 22:48
  Yeah, but obviously in the eyes of the attackers, they're still complicit because they're part of that state
• 22:52
  that is doing the brutalizing as far as they're concerned.
• 22:56
  So you get to, so how far is it from wherever you're staying to get to the site of the music festival?
• 23:02
  And what do you do the day before and how do you get there and when do you get there?
• 23:08
  So I would say it was about an hour and a half of a drive.
• 23:13
  I was staying with family somewhere near Napania,
• 23:17
  which is kind of like more so like center of Israel.
• 23:21
  The day before I was actually in the north,
• 23:25
  hiking by a waterfall, you know,
• 23:28
  I went to like,
• 23:31
  like, Drew's restaurant and, you know,
• 23:35
  just experiencing all the different parts of Israel and that's the thing.
• 23:39
  That's one of the main things that people tried to say after the festival was like,
• 23:45
  how dare you throw a festival like right near Gaza?
• 23:49
  And like my answer to that was the festival was on Israeli soil.
• 23:56
  So we shouldn't be allowed to do anything that's near one of our neighbors,
• 24:00
  so me hiking in the north the day before,
• 24:03
  that was near whatever border I was near,
• 24:06
  whether I think it was Lebanon,
• 24:08
  I shouldn't do that either.
• 24:10
  So we should all just only stay Tel Aviv in the center of the land
• 24:14
  and not use any other part of the land because it's bordering with one of our neighbors.
• 24:17
  And that was just such a ridiculous argument to me.
• 24:20
  By American or Australian standards,
• 24:22
  even Tel Aviv is right next door to, you know,
• 24:25
  everywhere is, as you say,
• 24:27
  you go from the middle of the country to the south of the country in an hour and a half.
• 24:30
  I mean, you know, I was in Israel recently and...
• 24:32
  Yeah.
• 24:33
  In the Farza New Jersey.
• 24:34
  Yeah. I mean, I couldn't believe that you land at the airport
• 24:37
  and like there are trains going in one direction.
• 24:40
  It's the Tel Aviv airport.
• 24:42
  It's in the suburbs of Tel Aviv,
• 24:44
  but the train to get to the border of Israel,
• 24:48
  Jerusalem, is only twice as far as the train to get into the center of Tel Aviv,
• 24:54
  even though it's in the suburbs of Tel Aviv.
• 24:56
  You're already a third of the way,
• 24:58
  essentially, across the width of the country.
• 25:01
  Yeah, anyway, that...
• 25:03
  So yes, we all know that.
• 25:05
  Israel's small.
• 25:06
  So yeah, if you're going to have a festival anywhere,
• 25:08
  it's probably going to be close to somewhere else.
• 25:10
  So you guys drive for an hour and a half.
• 25:12
  And do you go to the festival in the evening?
• 25:15
  When does it start?
• 25:17
  So I'm not even sure exactly what time it started,
• 25:21
  but basically with festivals in Israel,
• 25:25
  a lot of the time they don't give out the location
• 25:28
  until a few hours before the festival starts.
• 25:31
  And it's for different security reasons.
• 25:33
  Also, when you buy a ticket to a festival in Israel,
• 25:36
  it's not like here in the United States, let's say,
• 25:39
  where I am right now, that you can simply purchase a ticket
• 25:43
  and as soon as you put in your credit card information
• 25:45
  and your legal name and age and whatnot,
• 25:50
  you receive the ticket either in your email right away
• 25:54
  within seconds or in the app that you bought it from within seconds.
• 25:57
  In Israel, when you purchase a ticket,
• 26:00
  you're first putting in your information, your credit card,
• 26:03
  and you're requesting permission to purchase this ticket.
• 26:06
  And whether it takes a few hours or a few days,
• 26:09
  they do a vetting system.
• 26:11
  You have to put in your...
• 26:12
  You're a few of your social media accounts.
• 26:15
  Your legal government ID number,
• 26:18
  which sometimes can be an issue for people
• 26:20
  who don't live in the country and don't have a legal ID number.
• 26:23
  But if you don't, you just put your 0,000
• 26:26
  and you get past that part,
• 26:28
  and then you put your full name,
• 26:30
  your birthday, and so on and so forth.
• 26:33
  And then they do a vetting system where they look
• 26:35
  at your social media accounts,
• 26:36
  they try to make sure that you are who you say you are
• 26:38
  for security reasons.
• 26:40
  So already there's like different measures of security
• 26:43
  that they take in Israel for parties
• 26:45
  that we don't deal with here in the States.
• 26:47
  Right.
• 26:48
  So, you know, purchase the ticket
• 26:52
  and then you receive the ticket within hours or days,
• 26:56
  and then you don't receive the location until a few hours before.
• 27:00
  And we get the location,
• 27:01
  and as soon as we see the location,
• 27:03
  you know, like we're already packing our stuff,
• 27:05
  we're getting ready,
• 27:06
  and typically with festivals like these,
• 27:08
  nature parties, as we call them,
• 27:10
  Missibot Teva,
• 27:12
  they go anywhere from 24 hours to three days to four days.
• 27:18
  So generally you bring camping here with you,
• 27:22
  camping chairs, sleeping bag,
• 27:23
  tents, blanket,
• 27:25
  snacks, drink,
• 27:27
  lots of water,
• 27:29
  and you pack up all your stuff,
• 27:30
  a change of clothes,
• 27:31
  and we start heading to the festival.
• 27:33
  I think we left the house at around 12,
• 27:37
  or 1130, and we got there at around 130.
• 27:40
  And as soon as we got there,
• 27:42
  I arrived with three friends,
• 27:44
  all of whom were Israelia,
• 27:45
  I was the only American in my group,
• 27:47
  and they had maybe 15 or 20 other friends there
• 27:51
  who had already set up the campsite,
• 27:53
  and we got there,
• 27:54
  we just threw our bags at our campsite,
• 27:56
  and the campsite is on the festival grounds.
• 27:58
  So when you're at your campsite,
• 28:00
  you can still hear the music from the dance floor,
• 28:02
  you can still see all the lights from the dance floor,
• 28:04
  everything is right next to each other,
• 28:06
  and right away we started dancing.
• 28:09
  And just said the same for us,
• 28:11
  and you're saying 12 or one in the afternoon,
• 28:14
  not 12 or one in the morning?
• 28:15
  No, no, no.
• 28:16
  This was, we arrived at like 1 a.m.
• 28:18
  Okay, got it, right.
• 28:19
  So you get there,
• 28:20
  and things were already pumping and presumably,
• 28:22
  and how large is the space?
• 28:23
  Is it like in essentially a gigantic field,
• 28:26
  or something,
• 28:27
  with a single big stage at the end,
• 28:30
  and a whole bunch of people dancing in the dark?
• 28:32
  So there were multiple stages,
• 28:35
  and at that point it's in the dark,
• 28:37
  but they have like lights in the trees,
• 28:39
  and whatnot,
• 28:40
  and like all these different color lights.
• 28:43
  But I get,
• 28:45
  you could say like it was the size of maybe a football field,
• 28:49
  it was honestly dark,
• 28:50
  and I couldn't get an exact like,
• 28:53
  idea of like how big the place was.
• 28:56
  And the whole thing is not like a mosh pit,
• 28:59
  it's just people sort of,
• 29:00
  some people dancing,
• 29:01
  some people walking around,
• 29:02
  some people,
• 29:03
  there's like pizza stands,
• 29:05
  there's drink stands,
• 29:06
  there's places to buy little knickknacks,
• 29:08
  there's massage stations,
• 29:10
  there's ice baths,
• 29:12
  there's the camping area,
• 29:14
  which is like kind of like,
• 29:15
  I guess in a semi-circle.
• 29:17
  Yeah.
• 29:18
  And then the rest of the event is like,
• 29:19
  inside of that semi-circle.
• 29:22
  And then there's like,
• 29:24
  either some of these parties only have one stage,
• 29:26
  some have multiple stages,
• 29:28
  this one had multiple stages,
• 29:31
  like main stage and then smaller stage.
• 29:33
  So there's a lot going on,
• 29:35
  there's a lot of attractions,
• 29:36
  there's a lot to do.
• 29:38
  Got it.
• 29:39
  So you're there in the middle of the night,
• 29:40
  you start dancing,
• 29:41
  is the plan to dance through until some rise,
• 29:44
  or there is no plan.
• 29:46
  So generally,
• 29:48
  I do not stop dancing,
• 29:49
  been tired,
• 29:50
  I'm always moving,
• 29:51
  very hyperactive,
• 29:53
  especially when I hear side-trans music,
• 29:55
  it just gives you more energy.
• 29:57
  And the three friends that I came with,
• 29:59
  the only people at the time that I knew there,
• 30:02
  I later found out that my friend's brother was there,
• 30:05
  who unfortunately did not make it out alive,
• 30:07
  and another friend's friend was there.
• 30:09
  But at the time,
• 30:10
  I was only with those three friends.
• 30:12
  And at around 330, I would say,
• 30:16
  they were tired,
• 30:18
  a few of them were at a different party the day before.
• 30:21
  And they said they wanted to go back to the campsite
• 30:23
  and sleep for a few hours.
• 30:25
  And eventually wake up for the sunrise,
• 30:28
  set of the festival,
• 30:29
  which is supposed to be the most exciting part.
• 30:31
  You know, you're dancing the dark for all these hours,
• 30:34
  and you're really waiting for that beautiful sunrise.
• 30:39
  So I figured,
• 30:41
  generally I would just stay and dance by myself,
• 30:43
  but for some reason,
• 30:44
  I said like,
• 30:45
  okay, you know what,
• 30:46
  I'll come take a nap with you guys,
• 30:48
  and wake up for the sunrise.
• 30:50
  And then instead of waking up to the sound of the sunrise,
• 30:55
  we set music,
• 30:56
  we woke up to the sound of rockets.
• 30:59
  And when you say woke up,
• 31:01
  just where are you?
• 31:02
  You're not inside a tent at this point, right?
• 31:04
  You're just sleeping outside.
• 31:05
  No, yeah, we're sitting on camping chairs.
• 31:07
  We fell asleep like just sitting up.
• 31:10
  And when the first rockets were intercepted,
• 31:15
  we did not wake up yet.
• 31:17
  One of our friends from our campsite was on the dance floor
• 31:21
  when those first few rockets were intercepted,
• 31:23
  and she knew that we were sleeping at the campsite,
• 31:25
  and she wanted to come over and wake us up
• 31:27
  and make sure we were alert to the situation of what was going on.
• 31:32
  And something that was so important for me
• 31:34
  to really relate to the US audience
• 31:38
  and the international audiences
• 31:39
  when I first started speaking out
• 31:41
  and first started interviewing
• 31:42
  was the way she woke us up.
• 31:45
  Because it's kind of surreal.
• 31:46
  She comes up to us,
• 31:48
  and she's like smiling,
• 31:49
  and she's all calm,
• 31:50
  and she like nudges us away,
• 31:51
  because she's like, hey guys, you know,
• 31:52
  good morning, book yourself,
• 31:53
  which is good morning in Hebrew.
• 31:55
  And she's like, I just wanted you guys to know,
• 31:58
  like a few rockets were intercepted overhead,
• 32:00
  but you know it's fine.
• 32:01
  It's normal for the area that we're in,
• 32:03
  and we know that we're near Gaza.
• 32:05
  Also, it's a holiday,
• 32:06
  and they always do this on the holidays.
• 32:07
  Anytime we have a holiday,
• 32:08
  we're trying to have peaceful time with our family.
• 32:10
  They send rockets our way.
• 32:12
  This is a totally normal situation.
• 32:14
  It's probably just going to be a few like it always is.
• 32:16
  It's going to pass.
• 32:17
  The party's going to continue.
• 32:19
  Like, nothing to worry about,
• 32:20
  just wanting you guys to be like awake and alert.
• 32:23
  And I try to tell people, you know,
• 32:24
  imagine Coachella in California,
• 32:27
  and imagine people are dancing on the dance floor,
• 32:30
  and suddenly rockets are being intercepted
• 32:32
  right over their heads.
• 32:34
  Now imagine them reacting in such a calm manner
• 32:37
  that simply would not happen.
• 32:40
  But unfortunately for Israelis,
• 32:42
  this is their reality.
• 32:43
  This is something they go through
• 32:44
  on a semi-regular basis.
• 32:47
  Of course, there will be a lot of people
• 32:49
  hearing this who will think,
• 32:50
  yes, and on the other side of the border,
• 32:52
  it's always horrible,
• 32:54
  and they don't get to have dance parties,
• 32:56
  and the state of Israel is complicit in that.
• 33:00
  But we can get to all that later.
• 33:02
  I just want to put that on the table,
• 33:03
  so it doesn't sound like we're being one side about it.
• 33:06
  And just to clarify your mindset here,
• 33:09
  you don't have to answer this if you don't want to,
• 33:11
  but had you and your friends done drugs
• 33:13
  and been drinking,
• 33:14
  how foggy are you at that stage when you wake up?
• 33:17
  So at that point, we're completely sober,
• 33:20
  because we got to the party.
• 33:22
  I don't drink alcohol,
• 33:24
  and I was planning on maybe doing,
• 33:28
  like, acid or something,
• 33:30
  but we danced for a few hours.
• 33:32
  I didn't get the chance to do anything yet,
• 33:34
  and we were going to do everything in the morning,
• 33:36
  and then we woke up to the party basically being over.
• 33:40
  Okay. And so this is sunrise,
• 33:42
  and I guess it's getting hot,
• 33:44
  if it's October in Israel.
• 33:48
  It's insanely hot in October.
• 33:51
  Yes, very different from let's say the US,
• 33:55
  where in October, sometimes it's snow.
• 33:58
  Well, it depends where you are,
• 34:00
  but yeah, I'm sure in Texas, it's hot in October.
• 34:02
  Yeah, well, I grew up in New York.
• 34:04
  New York has always universalized their experience
• 34:07
  to everybody else.
• 34:08
  So talk to someone from Florida about the weather in October.
• 34:10
  You make us sound so horrible.
• 34:12
  I love New York.
• 34:14
  And so just to clarify for people,
• 34:16
  the rockets are being intercepted,
• 34:18
  because Israel has this missile defense system,
• 34:20
  Iron Dome, right, which fires rockets at rockets,
• 34:23
  and fires missiles at missiles.
• 34:25
  And so these things are just popping out of the sky.
• 34:27
  And when you see those,
• 34:28
  had you seen those before?
• 34:30
  Had you seen that happen before?
• 34:32
  No, so it just so happens,
• 34:34
  you know, I've been going to Israel almost every year
• 34:36
  my entire life,
• 34:37
  but it just so happens I had never been in Israel
• 34:39
  before.
• 34:40
  So unlike all the other Israelis who were so calm at that time,
• 34:44
  this was my first time seeing rocket.
• 34:46
  This is my first time seeing the Iron Dome in action.
• 34:49
  And what do you see and what do you hear?
• 34:52
  Basically, especially when it's happening right above you,
• 34:56
  you see like that like white line of smoke
• 34:59
  of like the rocket going to the other rocket to intercept.
• 35:03
  And then I think because it was right above us,
• 35:06
  you hear like a double boom.
• 35:08
  You hear the first boom of the rocket being intercepted.
• 35:11
  And then you hear kind of like the second echo
• 35:13
  that sounds like it's like almost coming from behind you.
• 35:17
  So it's like two booms.
• 35:18
  And I think it's because we were right under them
• 35:21
  that we're hearing that echo happen.
• 35:23
  Interesting.
• 35:24
  Okay. And how many of those start popping around over your head?
• 35:28
  I started counting them.
• 35:29
  The first thing I did was, you know,
• 35:31
  everyone else is all calm because they figure you know,
• 35:33
  we have the Iron Dome just happens on a semi-regular basis.
• 35:37
  It'll probably just be a few.
• 35:40
  And another thing I always try to explain to people
• 35:43
  because people ask why we didn't start running right away.
• 35:46
  And I try to explain to people that for example,
• 35:49
  like after October 7th,
• 35:51
  they started working for a Jewish nonprofit.
• 35:54
  And I was in our office in Tel Aviv.
• 35:56
  This was like months after the war started.
• 35:59
  And I was sitting outside eating lunch
• 36:01
  and suddenly the red sirens go off.
• 36:03
  And you know, you have like a few,
• 36:05
  like a minute or whatever it is to run into the bomb shelter.
• 36:08
  You run into the bomb shelter.
• 36:09
  You wait a few minutes.
• 36:10
  And then you go back to work.
• 36:11
  That's just like a normal day in Israel.
• 36:13
  Like you can't just stop your entire day
• 36:15
  and stop everything that you're doing
• 36:16
  and put everything on pause because a rocket was intercepted.
• 36:19
  That's just not how life works there.
• 36:23
  So in that case,
• 36:25
  we figured the same.
• 36:26
  We're like the same way we wouldn't stop our entire work day
• 36:28
  just because of a rocket.
• 36:29
  We're not going to stop an entire festival just because of a rocket.
• 36:33
  But I got up and I started counting the rockets.
• 36:35
  And first it was five.
• 36:37
  And then it was 10.
• 36:38
  And then it was 15.
• 36:39
  And then it was 20.
• 36:41
  And I think I noticed the summer between 15 and 20.
• 36:44
  Other people obviously started to get nervous
• 36:46
  and they're starting to realize like,
• 36:48
  this isn't just another ordinary situation.
• 36:50
  This isn't just, you know, Hamas trying to bother us on a holiday.
• 36:54
  There's something like weird going on here.
• 36:57
  And somewhere between the 10 and the 20,
• 37:00
  you know, the festival shuts off all the music.
• 37:03
  And they start to announce on the loudspeakers
• 37:05
  for everyone to pack up their things
• 37:07
  and start evacuating to their cars.
• 37:10
  We start packing up our stuff
• 37:11
  and we're evacuating to our cars.
• 37:14
  And at this point,
• 37:15
  we still had no idea that there were terrorists on foot.
• 37:18
  So close by.
• 37:19
  At this point,
• 37:20
  we still thought it was just, you know,
• 37:22
  quote unquote, just rockets.
• 37:23
  It's still a ridiculous statement.
• 37:25
  And is your,
• 37:26
  I'm sorry to interrupt Natalie,
• 37:27
  but is your attitude
• 37:28
  and the attitude of your friends?
• 37:30
  Oh, this is a bit of a pain in the ass.
• 37:32
  What a shame we're missing the festival.
• 37:34
  Or is it shit?
• 37:36
  This is a worry.
• 37:39
  I think people were a little worried.
• 37:42
  At the end of the day,
• 37:44
  like we said,
• 37:45
  like we mentioned before,
• 37:46
  we have the Iron Dome.
• 37:47
  And I think at that point,
• 37:48
  our biggest fear,
• 37:49
  we weren't necessarily that fearful yet.
• 37:51
  We were like,
• 37:52
  a lot of people,
• 37:53
  like you see videos
• 37:54
  that people took from the festival
• 37:56
  in the beginning of the rockets.
• 37:57
  They were like,
• 37:58
  oh, like why do they have to do this to us?
• 37:59
  We're just trying to enjoy ourselves a little bit.
• 38:01
  Like why does this have to happen right now?
• 38:03
  And people like were upset that the festival is over.
• 38:06
  Yeah.
• 38:07
  And it didn't enter your mind
• 38:09
  or anybody's conversation
• 38:11
  about the conceivability
• 38:13
  of an invasion
• 38:14
  or a physical breach, right?
• 38:15
  Like presumably,
• 38:16
  the border is secure as far as you're away.
• 38:17
  Nobody,
• 38:18
  yeah, nobody came close to thinking of anything like that.
• 38:22
  At that point,
• 38:23
  our biggest fear was
• 38:25
  perhaps from the intercepted rocket,
• 38:28
  you know,
• 38:29
  possibly hitting us,
• 38:30
  because that's still a possibility.
• 38:32
  Or a rocket getting through.
• 38:33
  I mean, it's conceivable, right?
• 38:35
  Yeah, it is possible.
• 38:37
  But I think for me,
• 38:39
  like because I had never experienced it before,
• 38:41
  I also,
• 38:43
  I completely disassociated
• 38:46
  from that moment onwards.
• 38:48
  And I'll go more into that
• 38:50
  as we go more into the story.
• 38:52
  But at this point,
• 38:54
  I'm really out of it.
• 38:56
  I'm completely disassociating.
• 38:58
  And that's,
• 38:59
  it was my body's natural reaction
• 39:01
  to a difficult situation
• 39:02
  and a stressful situation.
• 39:04
  So we start packing our things.
• 39:06
  We're heading to our cars.
• 39:08
  And at this point,
• 39:09
  we figured, you know,
• 39:10
  it's over 3,000 people.
• 39:12
  The majority are all trying to leave at the same time.
• 39:15
  Some stayed back.
• 39:16
  The ones who stayed back,
• 39:17
  majority of them were killed.
• 39:19
  Some left earlier than that,
• 39:22
  like middle-hole group that
• 39:25
  was heading out,
• 39:27
  because the majority were heading out at the same time.
• 39:29
  The ones who left earlier,
• 39:30
  majority of them were also killed,
• 39:32
  because the Hamas terrorists were waiting for them
• 39:34
  further down the road,
• 39:35
  but nobody knew that yet.
• 39:37
  So they kind of drove straight into the line of fire.
• 39:40
  And we were in that middle group,
• 39:43
  which majority that survived.
• 39:45
  We're kind of in that middle group.
• 39:47
  So we're heading out,
• 39:48
  and we figure, you know,
• 39:50
  it's over 3,000 people.
• 39:52
  The majority are trying to leave all at the same time.
• 39:54
  We're going to be stuck in traffic.
• 39:56
  And sorry to interrupt again,
• 39:58
  not only the pardon ignorance of the timeline of events.
• 40:02
  At this stage,
• 40:04
  have people on foot already,
• 40:08
  you said that the early levers got intercepted.
• 40:13
  So there were already terrorists,
• 40:16
  located at areas around the festival,
• 40:19
  or what painted a picture of the timeline
• 40:22
  between what's happening on land versus the rockets.
• 40:25
  They weren't at the festival grounds yet.
• 40:27
  They were waiting further down the road
• 40:29
  as people were trying to leave the festival.
• 40:31
  Got it.
• 40:32
  So nobody that was still on the festival grounds
• 40:34
  knew that they were terrorists, yeah.
• 40:36
  No, but they were around.
• 40:37
  They had done like,
• 40:38
  and when does like,
• 40:40
  when do the paragliders start like flying in?
• 40:43
  When does all that...
• 40:45
  The majority of it started happening
• 40:47
  as the first rockets were coming.
• 40:49
  So at 6.29,
• 40:50
  you know, the first rockets start coming,
• 40:52
  and then they start breaking through the gate.
• 40:54
  It was all like a very short timeline.
• 40:56
  But they hadn't made it to the festival grounds yet.
• 40:58
  So nobody that was still on the grounds,
• 41:00
  the people who left earlier
• 41:02
  when those first rockets started coming.
• 41:04
  A lot of those people did not make it
• 41:06
  because they didn't know
• 41:07
  that there were terrorists waiting for them down the road.
• 41:09
  Right. So it was far...
• 41:10
  The location of the festival was far enough away from the border
• 41:13
  that although there was an advancing army
• 41:16
  coming from the border,
• 41:17
  they hadn't reached there yet,
• 41:18
  and you didn't know it at the time.
• 41:20
  And what just one more question before you continue the story.
• 41:23
  When you say that you disassociated,
• 41:25
  is that something that you experienced at the time
• 41:28
  or is that a term
• 41:30
  that you're placing on the experience after the fact?
• 41:34
  No, that's something I experienced at the time.
• 41:37
  I fully disassociated to the point
• 41:39
  where I was having an out-of-body experience.
• 41:42
  And like I said, I was completely sober.
• 41:44
  I was sleeping before this.
• 41:46
  A lot of people were on psychedelics.
• 41:48
  A lot of people were on uppers such as MDMA.
• 41:51
  And for some people,
• 41:53
  they're doing studies now.
• 41:54
  For some people being on psychedelics
• 41:56
  and something that kind of changes your reality.
• 41:59
  For some people,
• 42:00
  it made their PTSD worse afterwards.
• 42:03
  For some people, it actually saved them from having
• 42:05
  really bad PTSD afterwards.
• 42:07
  Everyone has different reactions to it.
• 42:09
  I happen to have been completely sober.
• 42:12
  But I disassociated so much so to the point
• 42:15
  where I was having an out-of-body experience.
• 42:18
  And I...
• 42:20
  I'll keep moving.
• 42:22
  Sorry.
• 42:23
  I don't want to preempt anything.
• 42:25
  You can carry on.
• 42:26
  I'll get into it afterwards when we start running.
• 42:28
  I'll explain to you what extent
• 42:30
  I was disassociating.
• 42:32
  Because it is kind of scary to think
• 42:34
  that a person could just associate that much.
• 42:36
  So we're heading to our cars.
• 42:38
  And on the way to the cars,
• 42:40
  you know, I figure we're going to be stuck in traffic.
• 42:43
  So I asked my friends
• 42:45
  because everyone's trying to leave at the same time.
• 42:47
  And I'm sure you've seen the photos of this narrow dirt road
• 42:51
  with the cars all pulled over to the side of it.
• 42:54
  So that narrow dirt road,
• 42:56
  it was like a two-lane road
• 42:57
  that you had to go through to get to the main road.
• 43:00
  So we figured, you know,
• 43:02
  over 3,000 people,
• 43:03
  one narrow dirt road,
• 43:04
  we're going to be stuck in traffic.
• 43:06
  So I asked my friends,
• 43:08
  do you guys think I can use the bathrooms
• 43:09
  before we start heading out?
• 43:11
  And they're like, yeah, sure.
• 43:12
  No rush.
• 43:13
  Everything's okay.
• 43:14
  Like, at this point,
• 43:15
  we're still not panicked.
• 43:17
  Some people are.
• 43:18
  But majority are still not that panicked.
• 43:21
  So they were like, yeah, of course.
• 43:23
  Like, we're going to wait for you by the car.
• 43:25
  Like, go to the bathroom.
• 43:26
  We're waiting here.
• 43:28
  So I go to the bathroom
• 43:29
  and I head back to the car
• 43:31
  and not until about two weeks
• 43:33
  after the war had broken out.
• 43:34
  Did I realize how much I was putting my life at risk
• 43:37
  just by going to the bathrooms?
• 43:38
  Because about two weeks into the war
• 43:40
  was when this video surface
• 43:42
  of the Hamas Terrace
• 43:43
  coming to those yellow porta-parties
• 43:45
  that I was in
• 43:46
  and shooting at every stall trying to kill
• 43:48
  anyone who was hiding inside.
• 43:50
  So I was in those porta-parties
• 43:52
  maybe 10, 15 minutes prior to them arriving.
• 43:57
  So I go to the bathroom.
• 43:59
  I head back to the car.
• 44:00
  We start driving out.
• 44:01
  And it's bumper to bumper traffic.
• 44:03
  We're moving very slowly.
• 44:05
  And the festival security is on either side
• 44:07
  of this dirt road.
• 44:08
  Kind of like sheep herders trying to guide everyone
• 44:10
  in the right direction.
• 44:12
  And first they're telling us to drive in one direction.
• 44:14
  Then they're telling us to turn around
• 44:15
  and drive in another direction.
• 44:16
  And they're really doing their best to guide us
• 44:18
  to safety, to the best of their ability.
• 44:20
  And most of them died doing so.
• 44:23
  And after maybe five or ten minutes of driving,
• 44:25
  at this point,
• 44:27
  I would say around seven o'clock.
• 44:30
  After about five or ten minutes of driving,
• 44:32
  the festival security starts screaming at all of us
• 44:35
  to pull our cars over to the side of this dirt road
• 44:38
  and to get out of our cars and start running.
• 44:41
  And at this point, we couldn't understand
• 44:42
  why they were telling us to run from rockets.
• 44:44
  That didn't make any sense.
• 44:45
  Like, how was that logical?
• 44:48
  But we figured they're security.
• 44:50
  They must know something that we don't know.
• 44:53
  They have our best interest at heart.
• 44:55
  We shouldn't just listen to them.
• 44:57
  So we pull our car over.
• 44:59
  And we're sitting in the car for a few moments,
• 45:02
  just looking at each other confused.
• 45:04
  And that's when we hear the first gun shots.
• 45:07
  And as soon as you hear those first gun shots,
• 45:09
  you understand right away in that moment
• 45:12
  that the danger is much greater than just rockets.
• 45:15
  You understand right away that there are terrorists on foot,
• 45:18
  that they're close by, that they have guns.
• 45:23
  In that moment, we opened our doors and we started running.
• 45:26
  And all the cars around us did the same.
• 45:29
  And people were running in every direction.
• 45:32
  You know, nobody understood.
• 45:34
  Nobody knew what direction was the direction of safety.
• 45:39
  And there was no direction of safety.
• 45:41
  And that's a question that I got asked a lot in the beginning
• 45:44
  was how I knew what direction to run to to save my life.
• 45:47
  And I had a very hard time answering that question.
• 45:50
  And about three months into the war,
• 45:54
  I spoke at a vigil in Columbus Circle.
• 45:57
  And this man came up to me at the vigil.
• 45:59
  And he said that he had seen many my interviews
• 46:02
  and that he saw that I was having such a hard time answering this question.
• 46:06
  And he said that he had interviewed many Holocaust survivors in his life.
• 46:10
  That when Holocaust survivors were asked in life and death situations,
• 46:13
  how they knew what decisions to make to save their life,
• 46:16
  they coined a term called the choiceless choice.
• 46:19
  And basically, the meaning of a choiceless choice is that
• 46:22
  in these life and death situations, you don't have a lot of time
• 46:25
  to really assess which decision is going to be the better decision.
• 46:28
  Which might save your life as opposed to like might get you killed.
• 46:32
  But you simply have to make a choice in that moment.
• 46:35
  And that perfectly described every decision we made
• 46:38
  while running from the Hamas Terrace.
• 46:39
  They were all choiceless choices.
• 46:41
  When you say you heard gunshots,
• 46:43
  are they machine gunshots?
• 46:45
  Do they sound like a single rifle round?
• 46:47
  What are you hearing?
• 46:49
  It sounded like a whistle.
• 46:54
  It didn't sound like a...
• 46:57
  I guess that would be a machine gun.
• 47:01
  So I guess when the bullet sounds like it's a whistle,
• 47:04
  I guess that's a raffle.
• 47:07
  You're asking a total amateur.
• 47:09
  A single shot that doesn't sound like a bang that sounds like it's whistling.
• 47:16
  Yeah, it sounded like it was whistling.
• 47:19
  And it was very hard to understand where it was coming from.
• 47:24
  Right.
• 47:25
  Because it sounded like it was coming from behind you.
• 47:27
  But at the same time, it sounded like it was coming from the right and the left.
• 47:31
  It was very hard to comprehend where to run to.
• 47:34
  Because you couldn't really understand.
• 47:37
  Apparently Hollywood has done a terrible job of convincing us what guns sound like.
• 47:42
  Because sound effects always want to make it sound like it's more of a robust,
• 47:46
  deep, earthy bang than it actually is when it's actually just a kind of a...
• 47:50
  I guess it's a dramatic effect.
• 47:51
  Yeah, a dramatic effect, exactly.
• 47:53
  But apparently it's much more of a little crack or a pop than a deep boom.
• 47:57
  But it's okay, so that's that.
• 47:59
  And then when you say you don't know what direction to run,
• 48:02
  do you have a sense of which way is north and which way Gaza is?
• 48:08
  So that's the thing.
• 48:10
  The first 10 or 15 minutes that we were running,
• 48:13
  we were running aimlessly because we're being shot at.
• 48:18
  We didn't think to try to figure out which was north, which was Gaza.
• 48:24
  And after about 10 or 15 minutes of running,
• 48:29
  when I say that we ran for a little over four hours in total,
• 48:34
  what that means is we ran on and off.
• 48:36
  Anytime we didn't hear shooting for a few minutes,
• 48:38
  we would slow down to catch our breath.
• 48:40
  Like we mentioned before, it was very hot.
• 48:42
  We're wearing festival clothing.
• 48:43
  We're not really wearing clothing conducive for running.
• 48:47
  So after the first 10 or 15 minutes,
• 48:50
  we didn't hear gunshots for a couple minutes.
• 48:53
  We decided to slow down to catch our breath.
• 48:55
  And then we figured let's pull out our phones and look at the maps
• 48:59
  and see where we're running to.
• 49:01
  And that's when we realized that we were actually running towards Gaza.
• 49:06
  And we then had to look at the map and change direction.
• 49:12
  And then once again, we're being shot at again.
• 49:15
  And it sounds like it's coming from behind.
• 49:17
  Sorry Natalie, what's the landscape?
• 49:18
  What are you running across?
• 49:20
  It was mostly open plowed field.
• 49:24
  There wasn't like that many like trees or like places to hide.
• 49:28
  And the plowed fields were also very hard to run through
• 49:31
  because like it's plowed dirt and there's like rows of them.
• 49:34
  So you're kind of like running through like a wavy type of surface.
• 49:39
  And can you see hundreds of other festival goers still
• 49:42
  who are all running around or has everybody just burst sufficiently that?
• 49:46
  There were chunks at certain points you ended up in a place
• 49:50
  with way more festival goers at certain points.
• 49:53
  It was more scattered.
• 49:55
  A lot of the ground was just like flat ground.
• 49:58
  But then sometimes you had like a deep dive.
• 50:00
  And then you could see I remember at a certain point
• 50:03
  we're running in a certain direction from terrorists like from behind us.
• 50:06
  And then as we're running we see like down this cliff.
• 50:10
  We see people running towards us and they're falling.
• 50:13
  And we see that they're being chased.
• 50:15
  And then you realize that you're not only running from terrorists
• 50:17
  you're also running towards terrorists.
• 50:19
  And then you have to like try to take a different direction.
• 50:21
  And did you ever see the gunman or are they just known from the gunshots?
• 50:26
  No, I saw them from far away in front of me like as I mentioned
• 50:31
  when we were running like when we realized we're running towards terrorists.
• 50:34
  From behind me I never wanted to turn around and look at them
• 50:37
  because I was so scared that if I saw how close they were
• 50:39
  that my legs would freeze.
• 50:41
  And that I would be frozen in place and I wouldn't be able to move.
• 50:45
  So I always told myself like do not turn around.
• 50:49
  Whatever you do do not turn around.
• 50:51
  What did they look like from the top of the hill?
• 50:57
  I don't know like a lot of them like weren't in quote unquote uniform I guess.
• 51:04
  So you kind of just saw people chasing other people with guns and then people falling.
• 51:09
  Yeah.
• 51:10
  There wasn't necessarily like a specific uniform that all of them wore.
• 51:14
  Okay, so disassociation.
• 51:16
  What did that feel like?
• 51:19
  The on and off running anytime we stopped running for a few minutes
• 51:23
  and we would like slow down to catch our breath and we would be walking.
• 51:27
  There were multiple occasions where when we started getting shot out again
• 51:30
  and like everyone around us would start running.
• 51:33
  I would stand still and watch everyone run past me.
• 51:37
  And I would tell myself that it's okay and that I don't need to run
• 51:40
  because I'm outside of my body.
• 51:44
  And if my body gets shot I will still be alive
• 51:48
  because I'm not inside my body.
• 51:50
  And that's the extent of like the out of body experience I was having
• 51:54
  that I fully believe that I was outside my body
• 51:57
  and that if my body got shot I would still be alive.
• 51:59
  And each time that that happened my friends would turn around
• 52:02
  and they would look at me, they would shake me, they'd be like Natalie,
• 52:04
  you need to run because we cannot run and carry you at the same time.
• 52:07
  You need to move your feet and then I would kind of wake up
• 52:10
  and I'd be like I would look around me and I would see like everyone running
• 52:14
  and I'd be like oh yeah I need to run.
• 52:17
  And I wasn't hysterical at all.
• 52:19
  People around me were crying, people around me were calling their parents
• 52:22
  in hysteria and I was just looking around like yeah I should probably run.
• 52:28
  Have you since then ever had moments where you've interpreted that calmness
• 52:32
  in a spiritual context?
• 52:41
  I am a spiritual person and I do believe that I had someone watching over me
• 52:49
  but it's also hard to feel that way because then I think about all the people
• 52:53
  who didn't survive and I think why didn't they have someone watching over them?
• 52:57
  Why, what makes me more special than that?
• 53:01
  So it's a lot of going back and forth with survivors guilt
• 53:05
  and thinking like maybe it's just chance, like why me and why not them?
• 53:10
  Like there were so many incredible amazing souls that didn't make it.
• 53:14
  So it comes with a lot of survivors guilt and like but I am a spiritual person so I do...
• 53:22
  Yeah, I'm just curious, I mean because the coldly rational statistician in me,
• 53:28
  the materialist in me thinks well of course all of your choiceless choices
• 53:32
  led to your being here because someone was going to survive the festival
• 53:36
  and whoever that person is could be sitting here talking to me
• 53:39
  and ascribing some sort of meaning to all of the choices that they made.
• 53:44
  Well when I say like the choices choices I really do think that those were
• 53:52
  insane moments of chance.
• 53:58
  And there's one very specific choice of choice that will always stand out to me
• 54:03
  because it just reminds me of like how close I was to actually dying.
• 54:07
  And it was about three hours into running I would say.
• 54:12
  We passed by a group of friends from our campsite that we hadn't seen since we started running
• 54:18
  and they were all hiding in a ditch.
• 54:21
  It was maybe like 10 or 15 of them and they're hiding in this giant ditch in the ground
• 54:26
  and they call us over and they're like guys guys come hide with us,
• 54:29
  we're going to hide here from the terrorists.
• 54:31
  And from my group like I came with three people originally,
• 54:35
  so three out of the four of us start crawling into this ditch including me.
• 54:39
  And one of my friends is standing above the ditch and he's staring doubt at us
• 54:44
  and I guess in his mind he's imagining if he was a Hamas terrorist and he was above us
• 54:50
  and we're all in this ditch and he finds us.
• 54:52
  What would he do to us and he automatically thought I would shoot them right on the spot.
• 54:57
  And he started yelling at us and he was like guys if you stay in this ditch
• 55:03
  you're going to be sitting ducks.
• 55:05
  We have no chance of survival if we try to stay and hide here.
• 55:09
  And he said our only option for survival is to continue moving at all times and to continue running.
• 55:14
  So he yelled at the three of us to get out of the ditch and continue running with him
• 55:19
  and we told the others come with us and they're like no, no, this is safe.
• 55:22
  We're going to hide here. It's going to be okay.
• 55:24
  And we found out about a day or two later that none of them had made it out of that ditch alive.
• 55:30
  And that's like one of the moments that will always really stand out to me in my mind of you know
• 55:36
  it was between that choice of running and hiding and if I chose to hide
• 55:40
  I wouldn't be here talking to you today.
• 55:42
  Yeah, no, it's amazing isn't it?
• 55:45
  So the going back to the dissociation regardless of whether or not the reason why you're here
• 55:52
  is because there is a selection bias right.
• 55:55
  I mean, I think it's it's like lighter fight you know.
• 55:58
  Well, I'm simply I'm simply noting the fact that the people who made the choices
• 56:05
  that didn't succeed are not available for me to interview because they're dead.
• 56:11
  Right. And so who knows why they made those choices and why you made yours
• 56:16
  but I'm curious about whether that sense of being distinct from your corporeal body
• 56:22
  you know of being sort of indestructible felt like an out of body or like
• 56:30
  spiritual moment of epiphany.
• 56:34
  I think maybe maybe if anything the fact that I was calm made it possible
• 56:41
  for me to like continue to run faster or what when I was running when I wasn't
• 56:47
  because he's so sitting and standing still because some people because they were hysterical
• 56:51
  maybe ran like in the direction that they didn't even notice was a horrible direction to run to
• 56:58
  you know like maybe that hysteria messed up their path along the way
• 57:03
  made them like make a wrong choice that should have been obvious that it was a wrong choice.
• 57:07
  That's definitely a possibility.
• 57:09
  Well also I mean if you're on psychedelics as well I mean it's possible you know
• 57:12
  that you're just having the worst trip imaginable and you don't even know what's real
• 57:17
  and what's not real at that point.
• 57:19
  It's possible that the sobriety also helps.
• 57:22
  I do remember at some points wishing I was on MDMA because MDMA gives you the energy
• 57:27
  to run without feelings hired and I was exhausted and I felt like I could not
• 57:31
  move my feet anymore.
• 57:33
  And I remember thinking to myself like maybe if I was on MDMA I'd be able to keep running
• 57:38
  but I told my friend I can't keep running and he just looked at me and said well
• 57:41
  you don't have any other choice it's run or die.
• 57:44
  So I continued to run.
• 57:46
  And do you remember when you guys would pause and there would be other festival
• 57:52
  that was around and the shooting stopped temporarily?
• 57:57
  Were people talking like was there any conversation about like don't worry the IDF
• 58:02
  will be here soon or like you know these must be these people or those people
• 58:07
  or like what was the conversation?
• 58:09
  From what I remember hearing around me there was crying.
• 58:12
  There were people comforting other people even if they didn't know those people.
• 58:16
  There's people sharing water with each other and that kind of goes back to the type of people
• 58:19
  that were at this festival.
• 58:21
  When you think about it let's say when someone yells fire in a movie theater
• 58:26
  or when there's a shooting in a mall there have been a lot of instances of people
• 58:31
  trampling over each other and hurting each other.
• 58:34
  And I remember looking around at the way people were treating each other
• 58:39
  as they were running for their lives and I remember thinking to myself like
• 58:42
  this is such a good representation of like who these people are,
• 58:48
  who the side trans community is, like the way they were helping each other,
• 58:51
  the way they were taking care of each other of people they didn't even know a lot of the time
• 58:55
  because a lot of people got separated from their friends in their last moments.
• 58:59
  They were there comforting each other and it was kind of beautiful to see like along the way
• 59:06
  like these tiny little beautiful moments within all the destruction and chaos
• 59:11
  and scariness of it all.
• 59:14
  But people were calling their parents to say goodbye.
• 59:17
  People were trying to call the police.
• 59:20
  There was all different conversations going on.
• 59:23
  People, I didn't have telegram but a lot of people had telegram
• 59:27
  and they were receiving photos and videos of like the dead bodies
• 59:30
  and the pickup trucks that Hamas was driving.
• 59:34
  So people were like exchanging photos and videos with each other
• 59:37
  and showing people what was going on like right near us that we were running from.
• 59:41
  So the scale of it became apparent even while you were still being hunted essentially
• 59:46
  you were aware that this was a massive thing beyond just the scope of that festival
• 59:53
  that whole towns were being invaded.
• 59:55
  And what happened next?
• 59:59
  So something I don't generally get to share when I'm speaking is my mom's reaction to all of this.
• 1:00:06
  Do we have time to go into it?
• 1:00:09
  Okay.
• 1:00:12
  At this point, I'm disassociating.
• 1:00:14
  I don't think to call my mom and say goodbye because I don't think I'm going to die.
• 1:00:18
  And my mom, who is an Israeli living outside of Israel,
• 1:00:23
  she's always watching the Israeli news.
• 1:00:25
  She's always trying to see what's happening in her home.
• 1:00:29
  And she's also an insomniac.
• 1:00:31
  So whenever she wakes up in the middle of the night, she turns on the news.
• 1:00:35
  And she's calling me and it's 1 a.m. New York time, 8 a.m. Israel time.
• 1:00:42
  And I'm the only child and my mom has multiple sclerosis, which is a disease that's also very much related to stress.
• 1:00:51
  So in my head, I was like, I cannot stress her out.
• 1:00:54
  I cannot make her more sick.
• 1:00:56
  So she called me exactly at a moment where the word is no shooting and no rockets being intercepted
• 1:01:01
  and people are just walking aimlessly through the fields.
• 1:01:05
  And it's kind of like an eerie quietness and people are just kind of like exchanging information with each other,
• 1:01:09
  but they're not like screaming or crying.
• 1:01:12
  I was like, okay, this is a perfect time to answer the phone.
• 1:01:15
  And I pick up the phone and I'm like, hey, mom, which is mom in Hebrew.
• 1:01:20
  I'm like, hey, what's up?
• 1:01:22
  And she sounds so confused and she's like, Natalie, what do you mean, what's up?
• 1:01:26
  Like, there's a war going on.
• 1:01:29
  And I was like, yeah, like, she's like, did you not see the news?
• 1:01:32
  And I was like, yeah, like I saw something about rockets or something.
• 1:01:35
  And she was like, Natalie, there was, there was terrorists out of festival.
• 1:01:41
  Is it the festival that you were at?
• 1:01:43
  She knew I was at a music festival.
• 1:01:45
  And I was like, no, we were at a different festival.
• 1:01:47
  We're actually on our way home right now.
• 1:01:49
  Like, everything's fine. Nothing's worry about.
• 1:01:51
  And she was like, okay, I just want to make sure.
• 1:01:53
  And then they started shooting at us again.
• 1:01:56
  People started screaming.
• 1:01:57
  And I didn't want her to hear it.
• 1:01:59
  So I was like, you know, I have to go.
• 1:02:00
  We're on the highway.
• 1:02:01
  I had bad service.
• 1:02:02
  I'll call you when I get home.
• 1:02:03
  And I hung up on her.
• 1:02:05
  And I didn't call her until eight hours, like about eight hours later when I got home.
• 1:02:09
  Because I didn't want to call her until I fully felt safe.
• 1:02:13
  And I could tell her that I would safe.
• 1:02:14
  I didn't have the courage to like, I couldn't put her through that.
• 1:02:21
  I couldn't put her through that torture of not knowing whether or not I was safe.
• 1:02:24
  So I really didn't call her until I got home.
• 1:02:27
  That's both beautiful and fucked up.
• 1:02:31
  Natalie.
• 1:02:32
  I told my friends where I was just in case I died.
• 1:02:37
  So that they could tell her so that she wouldn't not know anything.
• 1:02:41
  So I was constantly like updating my friends.
• 1:02:44
  But I told them if my mom asks any of you where I am.
• 1:02:47
  I spoke to her on the phone.
• 1:02:49
  I did not tell her where I am.
• 1:02:50
  Do not tell her.
• 1:02:51
  But like, whatever you do do not, it's going to make her more sick.
• 1:02:54
  And she can't handle that.
• 1:02:56
  And I made them all promise not to tell her.
• 1:02:58
  When you spoke to her after you were in safety, was she fully surprised?
• 1:03:04
  Or did she say there was any part of her that thought you might have been lying?
• 1:03:09
  She said she felt like there was something wrong.
• 1:03:13
  She said that like, she's like, listen, I knew you were out of festival.
• 1:03:16
  And I knew what was going on.
• 1:03:17
  And like, I wanted to believe you, but she was like, I felt like there was something there.
• 1:03:24
  But she also, she wasn't angry at me for lying.
• 1:03:28
  She understood why I lied and that is because I love her.
• 1:03:33
  And she also, she wasn't hysterical after I told her.
• 1:03:36
  Like, I called her and I was like, listen, I don't want you to hear it from someone else.
• 1:03:40
  I want you to hear it from me right away.
• 1:03:42
  So I guess as soon as I stepped into the door into my uncle's house, I called her.
• 1:03:45
  I was like, I want you to hear it from me.
• 1:03:47
  I was there.
• 1:03:49
  I'm safe.
• 1:03:50
  I'm home.
• 1:03:51
  And she'd repeated that to herself.
• 1:03:52
  And then she was like, oh, like she took her a little bit to kind of like they just left.
• 1:03:57
  But that would be an amazing call to listen back to.
• 1:04:00
  Wouldn't that be, you know, to hear your disassociated self trying to eerily reassure your mother
• 1:04:07
  that you're not being hunted by a gunman?
• 1:04:10
  Oh, I reread my disassociated text messages all the time.
• 1:04:14
  Because my friends who did text me, I didn't tell them I was going to the festival.
• 1:04:19
  I only told my mom, but when my friends found out that there was an attack at a music festival,
• 1:04:24
  their automatic thought was our idiot friend Natalie must be there.
• 1:04:29
  Like she would always, she would get herself into a ridiculous horrible situation like this.
• 1:04:33
  Like, and automatically all my friends were checking on me.
• 1:04:36
  And I remember reading my messages with one of my friends and she was like, Natalie, please tell me you're not there.
• 1:04:42
  And I was like, oh, no, I'm here.
• 1:04:45
  And she was like, where are you?
• 1:04:47
  And I told her, I'm actually right in between the shooting and the rocket.
• 1:04:52
  And she was like, it's weird.
• 1:04:56
  It's weird to reread these messages and just see how casually I was like, yeah, right between the shooting and the rocket.
• 1:05:00
  Right. Yeah, this, don't worry. This will put your mind at ease.
• 1:05:03
  I'm directly in between the shooting and the rockets.
• 1:05:07
  So don't worry about me.
• 1:05:09
  It tricks me out to reread those messages and see how disassociated I was.
• 1:05:14
  Because how could I be that?
• 1:05:17
  Like how like that doesn't seem normal.
• 1:05:20
  Well, you're in a state of total shock and fine.
• 1:05:23
  Yeah. And it's kind of like freaky to like reread it and see how much of this state of shock you were in.
• 1:05:30
  And I remember her asking me like, do you have anywhere to hide?
• 1:05:33
  And I was like, no, it's basically open fields.
• 1:05:36
  I don't know where to really hide.
• 1:05:38
  And she was like, what can you get somewhere to safety?
• 1:05:40
  And I'm like, well, we're running from gunshots, but I'll let you know when I'm safe.
• 1:05:45
  And it was just constant like checking up on me to make sure I was still alive.
• 1:05:50
  How did you get out?
• 1:05:53
  So we continue to run and we ran for about four hours.
• 1:06:01
  And at a certain point, we saw like this like small tree bush thing.
• 1:06:07
  And we hadn't heard gunshots in a few minutes and we decided to sit under it and get some shade from the sun.
• 1:06:12
  Because there weren't many trees along the way.
• 1:06:16
  And as we're sitting under this, we're sitting with like maybe 10 other people.
• 1:06:20
  And we're all just kind of exchanging whatever, whatever information we do have at that point.
• 1:06:25
  You can imagine we're pretty confused.
• 1:06:27
  You know, a few hours ago we were on a music festival dancing and now we're being hunted by terrorists.
• 1:06:32
  We're just kind of exchanging information.
• 1:06:34
  And suddenly we see a pickup truck driving towards us.
• 1:06:38
  And for all of us, our automatic reaction was that this is a terrorist coming to kill us.
• 1:06:43
  And we all kind of half got up and like contemplated running.
• 1:06:49
  And then we all simultaneously realized like we have nowhere to run to.
• 1:06:54
  You know, if this is a terrorist, they're in a car, they have guns.
• 1:06:57
  We're on foot, we have nothing to protect ourselves with.
• 1:07:00
  And we all kind of just sat back down and really just accepted our fate.
• 1:07:05
  And I remember we're all just kind of like smiling and nodding at each other as if to say like goodbye.
• 1:07:10
  And it was nice knowing you and kind of accepting that like we tried our hardest but that this is it.
• 1:07:16
  And luckily for us, it was not a terrorist.
• 1:07:20
  The truck got closer.
• 1:07:22
  There was a girl sitting in the front seat and she was like waving her hand out the window.
• 1:07:26
  She had a festival wristband on.
• 1:07:28
  And she was kind of trying to like signal pass like this is someone coming to save you guys.
• 1:07:33
  Like I'm one of you.
• 1:07:34
  And as the car got closer, the man driving the truck yelled at all of us to get in the back of the pickup truck.
• 1:07:41
  And we all got in.
• 1:07:42
  And he drove us.
• 1:07:43
  It was about like a 15 20 minute drive to his hometown, which is Patish,
• 1:07:48
  which at the time was the nearest town to get to to safety that the Hamas terrorists did not infiltrate yet.
• 1:07:54
  And as soon as he drops us off, he turns right back around to go save more lives.
• 1:07:59
  And because of that, it took me about two months to track him down and to get his name.
• 1:08:05
  And I finally tracked him down.
• 1:08:07
  And when I went back to Israel for the first time, I got to meet him and thank him.
• 1:08:13
  And his name is Moshe Sati.
• 1:08:17
  And him and his son drove back and forth from their hometown of Patish to the festival grounds for about eight or ten hours that day, risking their lives over and over again to save the lives of people that they don't even know.
• 1:08:30
  And they saved about 300 to 400 people that day.
• 1:08:33
  Wow.
• 1:08:34
  And a lot of people don't know his name because there's a number of people that were heroes that day and that did that same thing.
• 1:08:42
  But Moshe only interviewed once with me for CNN.
• 1:08:48
  And after that, he didn't want to do more interviews.
• 1:08:51
  He said, I didn't do this for recognition.
• 1:08:53
  I didn't do this for a round of applause.
• 1:08:54
  I didn't do this for a gold star.
• 1:08:56
  I did this because that's who I am.
• 1:08:58
  And that's why, like, whenever I speak out, I always make sure to mention him because she really deserved that recognition.
• 1:09:05
  And so the road just paying a picture for us when you are under that tree and resting in the shade.
• 1:09:15
  Is that near what a two-lane highway that leads from the festival site to the nearest town or what is it a paved road?
• 1:09:25
  So at that point when we were sitting under that tree, it was near like a paved road.
• 1:09:33
  And there were like hundreds of other survivors walking down this paved road.
• 1:09:40
  But it was an empty paved road.
• 1:09:42
  There were no cars driving down specifically that paved road.
• 1:09:46
  And there were hundreds of other survivors who ended up at the same road that were all going towards the town of Pateesh.
• 1:09:54
  Because I guess word got around that the terrorists did not make it to that town yet.
• 1:09:59
  And everyone should walk in this direction.
• 1:10:01
  We were told to walk in the direction of the sun in order to get to this town.
• 1:10:05
  I see.
• 1:10:06
  So yeah, so majority, I think of the survivors ended up in Pateesh.
• 1:10:11
  And what happens when you get there?
• 1:10:14
  Are you in the flatbed of this huge pickup truck in the back with a whole bunch of other people?
• 1:10:21
  And then what you just get into this little town and get off and what?
• 1:10:26
  So we get to the town and then the center of the town is I guess kind of like an auditorium.
• 1:10:33
  And then in the basement of the auditorium, there's a gym that doubles as a bomb shelter.
• 1:10:38
  So they take us to the bomb shelter and people sitting in the auditorium.
• 1:10:42
  The people of the town, the people of the town came together and they a lot of people took people and like survivors into their homes.
• 1:10:50
  But a majority of the survivors were brought to the center of the town to the auditorium and the bomb shelter in the bottom of the auditorium.
• 1:10:59
  And it was Sabbath and it was also holiday.
• 1:11:04
  So people brought us Cholent, which is like a stew, like a meat stew.
• 1:11:09
  And they brought us hardwilled eggs and they brought us snacks and they brought us cookies and they brought us water and they brought us soda.
• 1:11:14
  And they really came together to take care of us to the best of their ability.
• 1:11:18
  And we're all just sitting there and we're drinking water and trying to gain some energy back after hours of running for our lives and really not believing that we made it out.
• 1:11:29
  But also not feeling fully safe yet because you're scared that the terrorists might eventually meet at the town.
• 1:11:35
  Yeah, that's the other thing that I'm curious about that the townsfolk themselves weren't fleeing to the north.
• 1:11:41
  Do you know whether by this stage the situation had been brought under control?
• 1:11:46
  No, because there was still like fear of the terrorists coming.
• 1:11:52
  I don't know why nobody knows why the terrorists didn't end up in Patish.
• 1:11:57
  It's a, I guess it's a mystery they didn't make it that way.
• 1:12:01
  Nobody knows, but we're thankful they didn't because a lot of us ended up there.
• 1:12:07
  And as we're sitting there, I remember we were sitting in the bomb shelter in the basement at first and then we went up to the auditorium.
• 1:12:15
  And I remember seeing woman walking around and reading off lists of names from their phones and at first I didn't understand what they were doing.
• 1:12:24
  And then I realized that they were receiving names from parents who had lost touch with their kids and who had heard that a lot of the festival goers were ending up in this town.
• 1:12:36
  And these women were reading off these names hoping that somebody would say like, oh, that's me and that they could give those parents the good news that they were hoping for.
• 1:12:47
  And I think about that a lot because I think about how many of those parents didn't receive the good news that they were hoping for.
• 1:12:54
  Did people put up the hands?
• 1:12:57
  Not that I saw. I hope some people put up their hands. I hope some parents got that good news.
• 1:13:05
  Was anyone in your immediate vicinity shot? Did you see anyone shot?
• 1:13:10
  Now from the people who were in Patish, the only time I saw people shot was as we were running.
• 1:13:15
  Yeah, that's what I think.
• 1:13:16
  So anytime like, yeah, so anytime we were running and we're running, we think we're running away from terrorists and then you see people running in your direction and falling.
• 1:13:25
  You automatically know to change direction.
• 1:13:29
  And in the herd of people who you were among, it's not like there were people dropping down in front of you or anything.
• 1:13:37
  People were okay in that group.
• 1:13:40
  It's possible that people who were running behind me were falling down.
• 1:13:44
  But like I said, I did not allow myself to turn around. I did not allow myself to see how close they were behind me.
• 1:13:53
  That was like my biggest fear of seeing how close they were. I'm just freezing in place.
• 1:13:57
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