Shuki Akst presses a piece of metal into my hand. Literally. “See how sharp it is? I saw a boy with 1000 of these in his body.” The boy was dead, like seven other people on the bus that Shuki was driving, at 7.20 on a lovely spring morning, when a 22 year old youth blew it up. It was eighteen months ago, but who’s counting?
I meet Shuki at the Kiryat Ata garage of Israel’s Egged bus company, where he worked for 31 years, and where his bombed, bewildered 960 bus has been brought to rest, in an unmarked graveyard behind the garage hangar. He doesn’t drive any more – he was retirement age, anyway – but he still comes by, every so often, to say hello to his former colleagues and his bus.
In case the shrapnel under skin isn’t enough, Shuki reaches into his disaster dossier – a personal collection of photos and documentation relating to the bombing – and pulls out his Xrays. There is a little dark spot in his skull. “Ball bearing. 2mm from the main artery of my brain.” He shows me pictures of him lying on the road, after he crawled out of the bus. “There’s my blood on the steps.” Perhaps he needs such mementos, because the ball bearing has wrecked his memory, or because the memories are too much. He doesn’t remember, really, what the bomb sounded like, except that he thought a tyre had burst, and kept on driving for 200 metres. “Then I realised the bus wasn’t moving, and either the brakes were broken or my leg was.” The stitches on his clothes had burst and his hands were dotted with blood. “Then I turned my head and saw the two passengers in the two front seats, dead. I turned round more and I won’t repeat what I saw there.”
He also probably doesn’t remember the sound, because bombs suck up noise in their blast wave, as well as sucking the life from human organs that contain air, like lungs, ears, larynxes, digestive tracts and tracheas. After the blast, Shuki says, there was a sound of nothing, before the screaming began. “It was a silence like death.”
He doesn’t remember the bomber’s face, either, because the young man stood behind him to pay his fare. “He was clean-shaven, I know that. He was wearing one of those photographers’ vests, carrying a big bag [later, the government says the bomber was wearing Israeli army fatigues]. He got on at 5 to 7 and he sat on there for 25 minutes. All I know is, he didn’t look like a bomber.”
But who does? In the 217 attacks – over 20 of them suicide bombings – that have been inflicted on Egged buses since the beginning of hostilities in September 2000, bombers have turned up looking like Orthodox Jews, soldiers and women (either disguised or real). They have brought bombs made with crappy fertilizer or army-standard explosive. They have filled their bombs with nails, bolts, washers and cut-up nuggets of steel construction rods. They have injured 834 people and killed 282, though only one bus driver, probably because most bombers move into the bus for a higher body count. In the words of fellow Egged driver Shimon Malol, behind the wheel of his bus in Jerusalem’s Old City, “this is a big moving target, with lots of people inside. What’s better than that? I’m in the frontline, and I know it.”
It’s a big frontline. Egged is the world’s second largest public transport company, after London Transport. Over 4000 drivers, carrying one million passengers, covering 620,000 km of tarmac a day. Since its founding in 1933, Egged has had a virtual monopoly, because in a country that can be traversed in two hours, unless you’re a Palestinian at the mercy of an IDF checkpoint, its buses were the best, cheapest, most efficient way of getting around. A cooperative that offered a prestigious, lucrative job, it stood for the best of Zionist ideals: practical, communitarian. Now, its blue shirted drivers represent something else, too: A tight brotherhood, under attack. There are many stories already written, and more to write, about F16s and M16s and D9 bulldozers, and the Israelis who operate them, and the Palestinians who are usually at their receiving end. This isn’t one of them. This is about the number 6, the 14A and the 20, the 863 and the 2, about the 7.15 and the 5.45 and the rush-hour and the early-starter. The “children’s bus,” blown up during the school rush-hour, and the Megiddo fire-trap, where the gas tank of the 830 caught fire, and the wounded burned to death slowly, and the bodies of a young soldier and his girlfriend were found afterwards, hugging each other. Human Rights Watch, not known for its pro-Israeli bias, calls suicide bombings a crime against humanity. So do I.
There’s nothing new about bombings and attacks on buses, they’re just more frequent. Israel’s opponents – now Hamas, Al-Aqsa, Islamic Jihad, then PLO, PLFP – were aiming at buses even before the state of Israel was founded, back when Zionists were pretty good at terror attacks too. When Zionists travelled around the country in the 1940s, they did so in armoured buses. The beginning of the 1948 “War of Independence” is dated by a machine gun attack on a bus. In 1954, terrorists boarded a bus full of Egged employees on a day-trip to Eilat, and systematically shot every passenger. And so on. There have been five bombings since the beginning of the year. These days, drivers and non-drivers use bus attacks as ghoulish milestones. “That was before the number 2.” “No, it was after the 20.” “Was that the first 18 or the second?”
“Israelis aren’t like they were ten years ago,” says Shai Attia, Egged’s shift manager in the nearby city of Afula. “This is their aim, to scare us, and in a way, they’ve succeeded.” As they would. According to Chicago politics professor Robert Pape, suicide bombs between 1980 and 2001 accounted for only 3% of terrorist attacks, but caused 50% of casualties. Suicide bombers take away any possibility of shelter. Nothing is safe. For the cash-strapped terrorist wanting a high body count and freaked-out public, there is nothing better.
Attia has only worked for Egged for nine years, but he’s bus driver aristocracy, not least because he’s a “member,” in Egged’s unusual cooperative set-up, which has 2534 members, and 3708 employees. Members have to be sons or sons-in-law of bus drivers (the sexual equality of the army has yet to breach Egged’s very male ranks), and pay $80,000 for a membership. In return they get better pay and some privileges. They get to choose the “safer” routes, for example – the ones that don’t go near settlements, or through bombing blackspots. Not that any route is safe, not really: For a while, drivers liked doing the Wadi Ara route, which passes through Israeli Arab areas, because they thought terrorists wouldn’t bomb Arabs. But then they did. Attia’s membership came hard, because he got it after his bus driver father Asher was killed in the first suicide bombing of the nineties, in April 1994, outside Afula’s central market.
Attia was a month away from finishing his three-year army service as an ambulance driver. His ambulance was called to the bombing, where he found a scene that’s now familiar, but wasn’t then. “My first thought was that everyone was Ethiopian because they all had black skin. There were lots of pieces of bodies. I went onto the bus and saw the driver’s seat and said, ‘the driver didn’t make it.’”
Only afterwards, when he met his uncle in the hospital, did he realise who the driver had been. And still, six months later, he joined Egged. “That was always my plan. Around the world it’s not a high-class job, but here being an Egged driver is a good thing.” There’s an old joke about bus-drivers here: A mother says her son can be a lawyer, doctor or bus-driver. It’s not funny for Shai’s mother, though, and must have got even less amusing when her other son joined up too. “Every time there’s a bomb, my mother can’t go to work, she goes crazy. If we stopped working here, a big stone would drop off her heart.” But he won’t. Call it the bus spirit: Not one Egged driver has resigned from fear. (Though a struggling economy might have something to do with it, too.)
Attia doesn’t smile once during an hour-long interview, though he’s jovial enough in translation. “Oh, you’re interested in Egged?” he says. “You and Hamas.” Later, he wonders whether the terrorists are fixated on Egged “because they’ve fallen in love with our monthly discount passes.” His stony-face is understandable, when he’s finished listing all the terrorist attacks he was involved in: One gunman who sprayed the bus station with gunfire, another two gunmen who opened fire nearby, a bus that arrived in the station and blew up in front of him.
“It was bus 823. That line’s got it a few times. The driver realised he had a bomber on board, but what can you do? He thought he’d come to the station where he could call security guards somehow.” He opened both doors to lessen the blast – successfully, because only one of the four passengers died – and saw the bomber smile as he reached under his jacket for the button. It’s a chilling tale, but here, you can always hear something worse. After a while, my translator Alon jumps up and bangs his head against the door in mock hysteria. Attia had just told him he “forgot” that his brother had been involved in a suicide attack, too.
Attia’s father’s bus was refitted and put back into circulation, just like Attia himself. This is typical behaviour in Israel, where resilience is defiance: After the particularly nasty bombing of Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem, it was re-opened within a week. After a Jerusalem bombing that killed ten people and wounded 180, fully-grown trees were planted to replaced bombed ones. No time to wait for trees to grow: When there’s no real refuge, pretending life is normal is as close as you get.
With this in mind, I don’t expect to find three buses sitting in Egged’s garage graveyard. “We have to wait for government permission to dismantle them,” says garage manager Yuval Shoham. “Sometimes they take them on trips abroad to show what terrorism can do.” The number 2, a red and white bendy bus that was blown up in Jerusalem’s Orthodox Shmuel Hanai district, had been shipped up – overnight, so as not to disturb anyone – a couple of days before. But it won’t stay long: Religious charity ZAKA, whose volunteers collect victims’ body parts for burial, is planning to take it to New York to raise money, and to put it next to a tourism stand.
On bombed buses, you can figure out where the bomber stood or sat, from the holes in the roof and ceiling. The 960’s bomb was so powerful, bodies were pulled out of the baggage hold. Shuki climbs onboard so that Nadav can take pictures. It doesn’t look like much of an effort, but it is. “I look calm,” he says quietly, “but I am in real distress.” The first time he came to see the bus, six months after the bombing, he couldn’t go near it. “I don’t feel like it’s my child, but like it’s an animal, like my dog who is sick. It hurts me.” He wanders round the bus, picking out shrapnel and giving it to me, under strips of metal hanging from the roof like deranged prayer flags, and washers from the explosion studded all over the roof, like flowers. It smells like a bomb, say Alon and Nadav, who have been to enough bomb sites to know. Another bus manager said he used to wash his nose till it bled, to get rid of the smell. Others turn vegetarian. I can’t smell anything, but that doesn’t lessen the effect. This is a horrible place, and I am spooked.
Relatively, Shuki is lucky. He didn’t get post-traumatic stress disorder, as 20% of bus drivers in attacks do, according to Egged company social worker Pini Rosenberg. Rosenberg leads a small team of company social workers, backed up by 90 volunteers, mostly wives and relatives of Egged staff. He is a quiet, serene man: His office is in Egged’s ugly concrete headquarters in Tel Aviv, but he has put landscape photography on the walls, and fills the plainness with classical music. He refers to Egged’s families, not employees (120,000 families, 7500 employees), and he wears Egged blue.
When there has been an “event,” as Rosenberg refers to attacks, about half his time is spent on terror-related social work. “It’s very hard for a driver, when one minute he’s driving and everything is beautiful, music, he knows he’s been working for twenty, thirty years, taking people from one place to another. Then in a moment, everything collapses with smoke, burning, dead people, parts of bodies everywhere.” It’s Rosenberg’s job to pin the driver back together. “We try to put him back to work, in some weeks or months. Either as a driver or a desk job. The main thing is to prevent PTSD.”
Sometimes, the drivers attend to their own sanity: After a bombing, Egged’s few hundred Israeli Arab drivers take themselves off to their buses, to wait out the storm of fury that breaks when the latest foul deed turns up on TV. “Later, they come back, and they work together as normal.”
But mostly, Rosenberg’s team is on its own. There’s no annual conference on bombed bus companies. There’s no other bus company whose biggest management headache is PTSD. An army psychologist has visited a few times to consult, but combat PTSD is different. “When a pilot is involved in an accident, he’s put back on the next plane. But when you’re driving a bus, you’re not alone, you have people to look after. You’re not armed, you don’t have any special help, you are living your life in a civilian place.”
“I don’t feel guilty,” says Shuki Akst. “More like I was the captain of the ship, like I have a responsibility.” It doesn’t stop when the bus blows up: Rosenberg regularly gets calls from families of victims who want to talk to the driver, to know where their relative was sitting, or what stop they got on at. And these days, the driver would probably know. In the blurry zone between civilian life and frontline that buses have become, it’s the driver’s job to know exactly who’s on his bus, as well as taking the money and watching the road. “From when the suicides began in 1995,” says Rosenberg,” every driver drives with his ears and eyes open like antennae.”
I only go on two bus rides on this trip, and both scare me. “Are you afraid?” says Eli Ben Shushan, a handsome sunglass-wearing driver who Egged trots out for most press requests, because he speaks good Californian English. “Don’t be.” Eli drives the number 30 from Jaffa gate terminal. It’s never been hit, but it drives through some danger zones, like Jaffa Road “bomber’s triangle.” “I don’t feel fear when I drive. Partly because I’m a fatalist – when it’s my time, it’s my time. But it’s more that I’m thinking ‘so what will I do even if he is a terrorist?’” His strategies aren’t scientific: He watches out for people who are sweating, who seem nervous, who pay with a big note and don’t expect change, who wear a heavy coat on a summer’s day. He checks out passengers waiting at bus stops, and might drive past if he doesn’t like the look of them. Like when the number 30 is driving past the “sniper’s wall” erected on a stretch of road near Bethlehem. An old man signals for the bus. He’s Arab, probably, though the physiogonomy of Jews and Arabs is often too similar to tell (handy for bombers) and Eli ignores him. “Let him complain if he wants; I don’t care.”
Later, the bus stops in traffic at the bomber’s triangle. “Let’s see – there were two on the number 18, just over there. One number 6, one number 14. That’s the Sbarro, and just over there is where a woman walked out of a shoe store and exploded.” Eli sees my pale face. “Don’t be scared. Be strong! Life goes on.”
This is a standard Israeli phrase, along with “what can you do?” Several things, it appears. At Jaffa Gate terminal, where Eli’s route terminates, a volunteer yeshiva student comes by every day to pray with any driver who needs it. There is superstition, as well as religion – Egged drivers are reluctant to be photographed, one tells me, because it’s a bad omen.
There are of course the massive, state-wide defence mechanisms, unleashed by the Israeli Defence Forces after every suicide bombing and whenever they feel like it. There is the construction of cement and steel being built between Israel and the West Bank, known as either the “separation fence,” the “apartheid wall” or the “obstacle,” depending on whether you think it’s to keep out certain Palestinians (suicide bombers) or all of them.
There are security guards, with metal detectors and fluorescent vests, guarding most shops, markets, bus stations and restaurants. There are constantly tuned nerves: “If you’re in a café and you hear one ambulance,” says Alon, who also works as a BBC cameramen, “you start thinking about paying. You hear two and you ask for the bill. Three, and you’re running out the door, because something big has happened.” And you’re always listening, always counting.
Since April 2002, there have also been security guards on buses, jointly paid for by the Ministry of Transport and Egged. Sharon Shabo, 25 years old, handsome and tight-lipped, joined up ten months ago. He won’t say much about what he does, for security reasons, but will admit to having been an army officer, like most guards, and to being in it for the principle. “Actually, I want to be a doctor. This is the same thing though, isn’t it? Saving people.” We’re at French Hill junction, where the number 6 was hit in May. How do the guards feel when a bus explodes? “Like shit. Usually, doing this job, you get a lot of girls giving you their phone numbers. But after a bombing, everyone’s hostile. It’s like we told the terrorist to get on and explode! But we’re doing our best to prevent it.”
Not according to Bridget Kessler. She’s waiting at the other side of the junction, at the corner of a road that leads up to settlements. I’ve no sympathy for settlers, but Bridget dissolves my hostility swiftly, when I stop her for a “normal” passenger’s opinion. There’s no such thing. “The security guards aren’t good enough. My daughter Gila was blown up right here, a year and three months ago. Right there where you’re standing, that’s where all her blood was. Her throat was full of shrapnel. She took an hour to die.” As I move my feet, like the blood is still there, Bridget says she doesn’t take buses any more, not even the bulletproof ones – they have straighter, thicker windows – provided for people who choose, stubbornly, to live in the Occupied Territories.
Bridget isn’t the only lost customer. After bus bombings, passenger numbers drop by up to 50%. Over the last two years, according to Egged, passengers have decreased by 20%. Only people with no choice – the poor, the newly immigrated, Arabs – take the buses, which explains why there are lots of Russian names in the lists of the dead, why Israel’s traffic is appalling, and why Egged, in November 2002, decided to sue the Palestinians for compensation.
In their lawsuit, Egged’s lawyers Caspi & Co are claiming for 210 million shekels, or £28 million. Bus damage is covered by government compensation schemes, but the loss to revenue, say Egged, is “grave, continuous, irreversible and unavoidable.” “We are suing the Palestinian Authority, the PLO, the Legislative Council and Yasser Arafat,” explains Ravit Zemch, an Arsenal-supporter and Caspi lawyer. “Our claim is that they didn’t fulfil what they undertook to do in the peace treaties. They have a responsibility to keep security.” (The day the suit was filed to a Tel Aviv court, there was a bombing, and all the damages and lives lost had to be recalculated.) The Palestinians, the lawsuit claims, are responsible for it by “indirect and direct action.”
Egged will present documents seized by the IDF during raids, which list financial requests from Al-Aqsa martyr’s brigades, affiliated with Arafat’s Fatah organisation, for more Kalashnikov bullets (which cost 5-9 shekels each, apparently), “chemical supplies” and money for recruitment posters. Consensus about the documents’ veracity is varied, though a June 2002 Human Rights Watch report concluded they were genuine. It also decided that no chain of command had been proven between Arafat and terrorists. Even so, given pronouncements from Palestinian officials such as PA Cabinet Secretary-General Ahmad Abd al-Rahman, after a bus bombing in Haifa last year, that such things were “a natural response to what is taking place in Palestinian camps,” the report is firm in its conclusion: “Arafat and the PA could and should have taken [important steps] to prevent or deter suicide bombings direct civilians.”
These are complex points that could sustain academic departments for years. But still Caspi & Co insist: “This case is not to be used as a political tool. It’s purely about money.” The fact that the Palestinians chose a Jewish lawyer to represent them underlines his argument; as the cases are being tried in Israeli courts, an Israeli lawyer is a better bet. There is serious money at stake. For tax-related reasons, Israel is supposed to pay the Palestinian Authority 200 million shekels (£26 million) a month. When hostilites broke out, they stopped the money. It’s now a handy carrot for Ariel Sharon to shake at the PA, and a pot of gold for plaintiffs, of which there are many. “It’s becoming trendy,” says Arnon, whose firm represents the PA in all these lawsuits. “We have about 60 cases ongoing and 20 pending. They’re asking for ridiculous sums of money. It’s clearly political. ” He has sympathy for victims – some of whom call him the Devil’s lawyer, but he has peacenik stickers in his office – but “I don’t think they’re doing the right thing.” As for Egged, the lawsuit will be useful when the company starts to privatise in 2004. “It’ll look better for the stockmarket, if they say they can recoup their losses.” But given Arnon’s expertise at stalling cases (the first victim who sued the PA, in 1996, has yet to have a hearing), it’s unlikely anything will be resolved soon. Just like the conflict, then.
Psychologists don’t know what the longterm psychological effects of this war will be, on both sides. I can guess, from where I’m sitting at the back of the not-very-crowded restaurant, my eyes on the door and who’s coming through it. Or where I see a bus, even after I return to England, and still say a silent “boom!” in my head. It only took a couple of days for me to be properly infected by fear. What would years of it do? “My son was not radical,” said the father of one suicide bomber. “He was radicalised.” Even Israeli Defence Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, after visiting suicide bombers in prison, said “the code that connects them is the despair that people come to.” All the Israeli victims I spoke to approved of the apartheid wall. They all look at Arab passengers with suspicion. Understanding is thin on the ground. “I don’t hate anyone,” says Shuki Akst, the mildest of all. “But I’m not willing to try to understand the bomber. I blame whoever sent him. I think generations need to pass, where children aren’t educated to hate us. I think we all need new leaders.”
And new jokes. Because that other notorious bus driver joke, intended to be a slur on Egged driving skills, is now black as can be: A rabbi arrives in heaven. He notices a bus driver is ahead of him in the queue, and complains loudly. “Why should he go first?” “Because when you speak, people sleep. When he drives, they pray.”
Published in the Independent on Sunday Review