The two women got out of the car with Wilson’s dog, Peanut, and walked a bit on the Israel Trail. They had wandered off the path to an overlook when suddenly two Arab men appeared and asked in Hebrew if they had any water.Read the whole thing.
“I was startled... so I answered in Hebrew, which was a mistake,” Wilson said. “I know what they were trying to do, they were trying to figure out if we were Jewish.”
The men gave her an uneasy feeling, so Wilson suggested they head back to the path. She walked in front of Luken and opened the blade of her pen knife.
“Suddenly, she screams, and as I turn around one of them pounces on me, the other one has already pounced on her,” Wilson recounted. “This is the moment I was so terrified.
This was the overwhelming moment of fear for me, this first part.”
She struggled with her attacker, who had pulled out a very long, serrated knife, and managing to stab him in the thigh with her pen knife.
It was this stab that later allowed forensics experts to collect DNA at the site and positively identify the attacker, the Shin Bet said.
“They didn’t stab us [at first], they were trying to quiet us down,” she said. “I have this overwhelming adrenaline of absolute terror.
I’m frozen for five minutes, I just don’t know what to do.
Somehow emotionally that moment passes and I’m able to think a little more clearly.”
Wilson switched tactics, showing her tour guide badge and saying that a bus full of tourists was about to come looking for them, offering the attackers all of their belongings.
She kept telling Luken, “Don’t worry, I’ve got a plan.”
“I was talking crap, I didn’t have a plan,” she said.
Meanwhile, the attackers were on their cellphones, saying over and over in Arabic, “Where are you?!” coordinating with at least one other member of the terrorist cell who was in the getaway vehicle.
Twenty minutes had passed since the men first attacked Wilson and Luken. One of the men forced Wilson to take off her shoes and used the laces to bind the women’s hands behind their backs.
“Then there’s this moment, I’ll never forget this. He takes off my Star of David. He very gently bows my head, takes it off like a fiancé would. And he has this smirk on his face.”
Later, the man would stab Wilson in the very spot where her Star of David lay.
(h/t aparatchik)