Re: suicide bombings


Mel Rowing wrote:
JOHN BENNETT wrote:
"Ariadne" <ariadne@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1152840103.605417.132840@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

The poster could get some information
from the very courageous bus drivers of
Israel.

ROTFLOL!
You simply couldn't make it up, you just couldn't.
Most bus drivers in Israel are Palestinians.

Perhaps but not of the self destructive kind.

One thing they watch for in people boarding
their buses is a sign of their being drugged.

Most Israelis are drugged upto their eyeballs on a daily basis, so how could
they tell?

Well you are and we can tell!

He and al-Xley must share a dealer and his
bad crack!

GORDON BENNETT
_

Driving in the Valley of the Shadow of Death
It's the management problem from hell: How do you run a company whose
customers and employees are being killed?

From: Issue 74 | September 2003 | Page 87 | By: Jessica Steinberg

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Lior Baratz has spiky blond streaks in his hair, silver rings on his
fingers, and wraparound aviator sunglasses. All of which makes him a
pretty typical 26-year-old Israeli, if not all that typical of his
profession. Baratz is a driver for Egged, the sprawling Israeli bus
company, and although he's been on the job only three years, he is an
Egged veteran in the most graphic, indelible way.

In April 2002, Baratz was at the wheel of Egged bus number 23, his
regular route through Jerusalem. He was waiting out a red light on a
Friday afternoon on Jaffa Road, in front of the bustling Mahane Yehuda
outdoor market. Facing him across the intersection was Egged bus number
32A, coming the other way.

As Baratz looked through his windshield, the number 32A bus exploded
right in front of him. The blast was so powerful, it blew out all the
windows of bus32A, and the big bus leaped up off the road. The boom of
the explosion rolled over Baratz and his passengers. There was a moment
or two of total silence. Then the screams started.

Before Baratz could react, his passengers crowded to the front, yelling
at him to open the door. They tumbled out, and he went with them,
racing across the street to see what he could do.

But by the time Baratz got to the bus, Israeli emergency personnel were
already there, taking control of the scene, attending to the injured
and dead. They took Baratz aside, then sent him to be checked at the
hospital, where he talked to a counselor before being sent home. The
bombing killed 6 and injured 104, including the driver.

Egged offers drivers involved in bus bombings a few days off, but it
doesn't force them to stay home. And Sunday morning, less than 48 hours
after he watched a bus just like his blow up before his eyes, Baratz
was back behind the wheel of the #23, running his regular route, right
through the intersection where the bombing took place. "After a
bombing, we act as if nothing happened," says Baratz. "Our mentality is
that we don't like to look inside ourselves and think about it. We're
not like that."

During the last three years, since the start of the second Palestinian
intifada in Israel and the Palestinian territories, Egged has been a
company under attack almost as directly as the nation of Israel itself.
Since March 2001, suicide bombers have blown themselves up inside, or
alongside, 20 Egged buses. On average, that's a bombing attack on the
company's buses, drivers, and customers every 40 days (although the
bombings tend to come in clusters).

Those attacks have killed 143 passengers -- more than 25% of all
Israeli civilian deaths in the intifada. Because Israel is so small --
just 6 million residents -- those 143 deaths are the equivalent of
7,000 in the United States, more than twice the number that died on
September 11.

"After a bombing, we act as if nothing happened," says Lior Baratz, who
watched a bus blow up right across from his own.
The goal of the attacks has been to turn one of the most ordinary,
reassuring, reliable objects in the landscape -- a city bus -- into an
object of uncertainty and terror, to lace a ribbon of fear through any
trip or errand where an Egged bus is visible.

The company has responded in a typically pragmatic Israeli way. "Buses
are the easiest target with the highest number of possible victims,"
says Arik Feldman, the company chairman, who started out as a bus
driver and still does double duty as the manager of the company's
northern depot. "But we live with it. That's our harsh reality. And if
a bus blows up, it doesn't stop us from running public transportation.
It gives us more courage to continue so no one can prevent us from
living here."

There is no management book, no business-school case study, on how to
lead a company that has become a target of war. As much as any
particular security measure or management plan, what has kept Egged's
executives and managers going during the intifada is the attitude
Feldman expresses. It's not simply persistence or determination. It's a
refusal to be a victim, even of circumstances you don't control.

More than a target of opportunity for Palestinian bombers, Egged has
been a target of intentionality. The company operates 70% of the public
bus service in Israel. Founded in 1933, it is older than the state
itself. Its red and green buses are a source of national pride and an
emblem of national normalcy. Every day, the company fields 3,400 buses
and carries 1 million Israeli and Arab-Israeli residents. It is
essential.

The bombings have reduced ridership a total of 10% in the last three
years, but they haven't forced Egged off the road. Its corporate
response to being a target of terror -- week after week, month after
month for three years -- is essentially the same as young Baratz's
response to being one red light from disaster: Grab the wheel and keep
driving. The company has not surrendered a single route in the face of
the terrorists, even though some individual roads account for 10% or
more of the attacks. Egged says that not a single one of its drivers
has resigned because of this wave of bombings and other attacks, which
have injured 21 of them but killed only one (another driver died in an
attack in 1994).

What Egged managers and drivers confront as a matter of ordinary,
everyday operations is the stuff of American nightmares in the wake of
September 11. And if terror attacks ever come home to America with the
numbing regularity and lethality that they have in the Middle East,
Egged's purposeful response will be instructive.

How Egged has continued to operate is a story of macho pride,
ingenuity, and a certain Israeli matter-of-factness. The company can't
control the circumstances that have created this cycle of suicide
bombers. Instead, drivers and managers have learned to adapt to the
realities of the situation. This spring, Egged, known in Israel for
protecting the privacy of its drivers and the security of its
procedures, granted a Fast Company reporter unprecedented access to its
staff and facilities. The picture of persistence that emerges is a
vivid lesson in how one company operates under impossible
circumstances.

"It's the little things that help you conquer the fear"
Reuven Rotchild, 46, has been folding his 6-foot-5 frame into the
driver's seat of Egged buses for 18 years. He has always driven the
routes in and around Afula, the northern town where he has spent most
of his life. These days, he often drives route 835.

Route 835 is one of the runs along Wadi Ara Road, from Afula down to
Tel Aviv and back, through a series of arid Arab and Israeli towns and
villages. In the northern reaches, Wadi Ara Road skirts the "seam
line," a de facto border between the Palestinian territories and
Israel, a porous zone through which dozens of suicide bombers have
entered Israel. Buses on this road have proven particularly vulnerable
to attack. In the last two years, suicide bombers have struck buses on
the route six times.

Driving Wada Ara Road has become an exercise in fear management. Before
he gets on his bus, Rotchild pauses most days to say the traditional
Jewish morning prayers -- a 20-minute ritual that involves strapping on
two small boxes containing Torah scrolls. Rotchild isn't particularly
observant. But he started saying the prayers, he says, for peace of
mind, that "someone should watch over us." The ritual is not uncommon
among Egged drivers since the attacks started, he says. "On every trip,
you feel like you could be the next target," says Rotchild. "It's the
little things that help you conquer the fear."

Those little things are Rotchild's daily routines -- some of which
would be familiar to bus drivers anywhere, some that reflect the
suspicions of a security agent. Often, the ordinary and the suspicious
are indistinguishable.

When Rotchild boards his long green Volvo coach each morning, he does a
walk-through, peering into the small garbage can next to the back door,
looking for any unclaimed bags. He's looking for litter and also for
packages that could conceal a bomb. (Another Egged driver prevented a
disaster in July 2001 by finding a bomb left on his bus, hidden in a
watermelon.) He settles into the high driver's seat and adjusts his
mirrors -- including one that lets him look back at what his passengers
are doing.

Whatever sense of captainship bus drivers normally feel, Rotchild has
come to feel an added responsibility for guarding his passengers from
death. "I have to suspect anyone who looks a little suspicious, or
dresses a certain way," he says. "I have a responsibility and
commitment to check everything out, particularly for my passengers from
Afula, because they know me."

Rotchild has never seen a suicide bomber, but he never stops looking.
He appraises every passenger waiting at each stop, running through his
mind the list of tip-offs to a bomber: a man wearing a heavy coat,
especially in warm weather, to hide bulky explosive belts; someone
carrying a large bag that could contain a bomb; a man dressed as an
ultra-Orthodox Jew in a place where they aren't common; an odd wire
sticking out of a pocket; or simply someone with a nervous look in his
eyes.

In the past, drivers weren't allowed to decide who boards and who
doesn't, any more than they would be in the United States; but Egged
now gives them that latitude. On Wadi Ara Road, if Rotchild spots a
lone passenger waiting at an isolated stop, he often doesn't stop. "I'm
very selective on Wadi Ara, especially at certain stops." It's an
exhausting, even corrosive, state of mind, and it has taken some of the
shine off being a driver for Rotchild. "I didn't come to Egged to be a
soldier," he says.

Much of Israel relies on municipal or intercity buses to get around.
There are no yellow school buses, for instance; school children use
Egged. Professionals use it to commute; soldiers ride free. On a
weekday morning in Jerusalem, the typical bus is full, its 40 seats and
central aisle packed with passengers. Sixty percent of the company's
fleet is made up of new, tree-green, sulfur-emission-reduced diesel
buses; the cushioned seats are comfortable, the air-conditioning works.
Prices are cheap -- about $1 for a city ride, $0.60 for students and
seniors.

The intent of the bombers is to disrupt everyday life in Israel. What
they have done, in the case of Egged, is make people suspicious and
afraid -- of fellow riders, of the buses themselves. The fear is
constant, present wherever the buses are. Everyone lives with it:
drivers, Israeli passengers, Arab passengers, pedestrians walking by
one of the hundreds of bus stops along city streets, even drivers
sitting in cars next to an Egged bus in traffic, wondering if the bus
will blow up before the light turns green.

Part of the power of terrorism is that it creates fear out of
proportion to the actual danger. Residents of Israel, in fact, are far
safer riding the buses than driving their cars. During the last three
years, some 1,100 people have died in car accidents on Israeli roads,
seven times the number killed in bus attacks.

Still, fear has seeped into many daily interactions. On a recent
morning, an ultra-Orthodox passenger boards Lior Baratz's bus, then
apologizes for speaking on his cell phone while paying for his ticket.
Baratz strikes up a conversation. Given the divide between Israel's
secular and religious citizens, this friendly exchange is unusual, but
the passenger and driver are reassuring one another. The most recent
bomber technique is to dress in the long black coats, black hats, and
side curls worn by ultra-Orthodox men. "It's become part of the routine
to look for bombers," says Baratz, "and yet not think about being
bombed."

Drivers must also be careful not to overreact. Recently, an Arab
teenager in Afula approached the door of a bus being driven by Shai
Halevi. The boy was dressed in a heavy coat, laughing and pretending he
was about to detonate himself. Halevi brushed it off as a typical
teenage prank. And when an Arab passenger he recognizes gets on board,
Halevi makes a point of putting on a show of friendliness for the
benefit of the other passengers. "You're like a psychologist in this
job, thinking through every scenario so that no one gets scared,"
Halevi says. "I can't put everything into fearing this situation,
because if I did, I wouldn't be able to get up and work every morning."

". . . Lunch would be served"
Zvi Aharoni, 48, was just a few yards from the Afula bus depot on a
March morning in 2002 when the number 823 bus exploded in the station.
Aharoni is a manager and dispatcher at Afula. He raced to the bus,
where he got a sickening glimpse of the power of the bomb: on the front
steps of 823 sat the head of the terrorist.

"Buses are the easiest target with the highest number of possible
victims. But we live with it. That's our harsh reality. And if a bus
blows up, it doesn't stop us from running public transportation. It
gives us more courage to continue so no one can prevent us from living
here."
Arik Feldman, Chairman and CEO

Emergency personnel arriving at the scene shooed Aharoni and his
colleagues away from the shattered bus. Aharoni busied himself getting
the depot -- its windows shattered by the blast -- cleaned up. Quickly,
a goal came to him: He focused on getting the lunchroom where the
drivers eat back to normal. He wanted that as a sign, for drivers
coming in for their midday meal, that life was moving forward.

"I didn't know if anyone would be able to eat," Aharoni says, "but I
wanted to be sure that lunch would be served." Three hours after the
bombing, lunch was served in a cafeteria from which all possible traces
of the bombing had been removed.

Israelis do not call the three-year conflict the "intifada," an Arabic
word meaning "uprising." Instead, they refer to the conflict by the
Hebrew word matzav, which means "situation." Before the conflict,
matzav was part of a common greeting, "Ma hamatzav?" -- literally,
"What's the situation?"

The language is revealing. For Egged, the bombings are part of the
matzav, part of the situation -- a piece of the great uncontrollable
environment that must be coped with, much as a U.S. manager would cope
with the economy. "We don't know when the situation will be over," says
Opher Linchefski, Egged's chief financial officer. "We hope it will
end. So we treat this like a recession. . . . The situation is just one
of the parameters we think about now."

For Linchefski and his colleagues, dealing with the situation means
controlling what you can while making as few mistakes as possible and
staying focused on the future in the certainty that things will
eventually improve. The bombings will end someday, just as economic
cycles eventually turn. It's an unlikely combination of acceptance and
determination. The bombings might paralyze another organization or
group of people. Egged's managers decline to be held captive by them.

Israelis don't call the three-year conflict the "intifada." To them,
it's "the situation." Says Linchefski: "We don't know when the
situation will be over. We hope it will end. So we treat this like a
recession. . . .The situation is just one of the parameters we think
about now."
Opher Linchefski, CFO

The bombings have hit the company at a challenging time. The Egged
Israel Transport Cooperative Society Ltd. has perhaps the most
complicated corporate structure imaginable -- part regulated public
utility, part enterprising growth company, part kibbutz. (The name
Egged means "linked together.") The company has 7,000 employees,
including 4,125 drivers, many second-generation; of those, 2,800 have
bought into the cooperative and have a say in how Egged is run.

Linchefski is in the midst of an 8-year plan to restructure Egged. The
company is preparing to un-wind the cooperative ownership structure in
the next few years; the government is slowly opening its routes to
competition; and Egged is expanding into new businesses, including
operating a van service and investing in a light rail system.
Linchefski has continued a 10-year effort to make Egged more efficient
-- the workforce is down 32% from 10,280 employees in 1989. The
challenge of the last three years has been to maintain Egged's market
share and revenue -- annual revenue is around $600 million, but the
company has lost $100 million since the intifada began -- while
maintaining service and morale. "We live and breathe this thing," says
Linchefski. "We hope the situation will improve. But even if it
doesn't, we continue our work."

As it turns out, morale has been less of a problem than one might
guess. Egged drivers show much the same esprit as New York firefighters
in the wake of September 11, and the public sees them that way too, as
everyday heroes. And in a country where unemployment is above 10%,
drivers are happy to have not just a job, but a good job: Egged's
salaries are high for Israel.

For the company's managers, the situation affects every decision. But
Egged hasn't created the defense mechanisms a similarly threatened U.S.
company might. The company doesn't have a team to analyze bombings to
detect things that might be making buses more vulnerable; that is done
by the military and the police, with Egged's input. Its buses have not
been redesigned to better protect riders, although the newer buses have
a plastic panel behind the high driver's seat, which may in part be why
just one driver has been killed.

What Egged has done is create a dedicated security force. Following the
first serious wave of suicide bombings in 1996, it put specially
trained personnel on buses and at terminals and stops to watch for
attackers. That strategy has been expanded over the past two years --
Egged now has a full-time security force of 450.

One of Raz's innovations is his "Kojak car," a small Fiat with a siren,
staffed by a pair of security guards who drive the Wadi Ara Road ahead
of the buses, keeping an eye out for anything suspicious. "We have no
way of knowing where the next bomb is going to hit," he says.
Aza Raz, Security officer

Egged's guard trainees are between 22 and 31, many recent veterans of
the Army's hard-core fighting units. They spend 10 days in intense
physical training, including improving hand-to-hand combat skills. But
with 450 guards and 3,400 buses, the force is spread thin. "We can't
cover it all," says Linchefski. "It's all about probabilities, trying
to figure out the best places to put the guards that we have."

One-third of those guards are in the hands of Aza Raz, a 58-year-old
former paratrooper with a graying-blond crew cut and a military
bearing. Raz, who drove buses for 20 years before being promoted, is
Egged's security officer for the northern region -- the area that
includes Afula. Raz's pager often wakes him at 4 AM, as text messages
start coming in from the Israeli Army and police with intelligence
about potential terror attacks. By mid-morning, he may have 20 such
alerts, which he uses in deciding how to deploy his guards.

A large map on Raz's office wall has lines of thumbtacks tracking Wadi
Ara Road, as well as vulnerable areas in Haifa, which also has been hit
by bus bombings. One of his innovations is what he calls his "Kojak
car," a small Fiat with a siren, staffed by a pair of guards who drive
the Wadi Ara Road ahead of the buses, keeping an eye out for anything
suspicious. "We have no way of knowing where the next bomb is going to
hit," Raz says. "But we have no choice but to ride on roads like Wadi
Ara, because we're a monopoly. We're Egged."

After the Bomb
The hollow metal skeleton of bus number 14A, blown up in a suicide
bombing on Jaffa Road in Jerusalem in early June, sits in a back corner
of the Denya bus depot in Jerusalem. Long strips of the bus's
red-and-white metal siding are crumpled up on the pavement alongside
the bus like pieces of aluminum foil. Some seats, their red-and-orange
striped upholstery shredded to reveal chunks of foam, sit outside the
bus, the corners burned black.

Reclaiming parts from shattered buses is just another facet of Egged's
resilience.
Both sets of metal stairs leading into the bus are buckled from the
intensity of the blast, and the front and rear door frames are warped,
as are the black metal grab bars once held by standing passengers. The
dashboard sits askew, revealing a labyrinth of wiring. Just five steps
down the aisle from the driver's seat, a large, ragged rectangular hole
through the floor shows where the bomber stood when he detonated
himself. The blast knocked out every window, including the windshield,
shattered the driver's rearview mirror, and destroyed the small red
metal box that held the fire extinguisher. The bus was packed with
rush-hour passengers -- seats full, people standing in the aisle.
Seventeen passengers were killed, torn apart when the bomb went off.

But some things improbably survived. Despite the damage around his
seat, Ibrahim Atrash, the Arab-Israeli driver, was only slightly
injured. On the ledge to the left of his seat, which is missing its
high back cushion, sit some coins and a bus schedule folded in half,
its seams worn. At the back door, the lid to the plastic garbage can is
partly melted, but two discarded soda bottles and a juice carton inside
are unscathed. A sticker attached to the back wall reads, "Passenger:
Please look around and report any suspicious objects to the driver.
Remember: Vigilance prevents disaster!!!"

In the case of bus 14A, vigilance didn't protect the bus from the
bomber, who boarded at a busy stop that had been checked by an Egged
security guard 20 minutes before the blast. The guard questioned two
Arabs who were waiting to board the bus, but didn't suspect anything
about the bomber, Abed Almuati, a 17-year-old Palestinian who was
dressed as an ultra-Orthodox Jew.

By the time a destroyed bus is taken to the nearest bus yard, one thing
that has been removed is any evidence that people were hurt or killed.
Bus 14A has no blood stains, no reminders of the bodies blown to pieces
by the metal fragments packed into the bomber's explosives belt. Every
piece of flesh and fragment of skin is gathered, removed, and
identified. The skeleton of the bus is brought to the yard so that
Egged mechanics can salvage what they can -- including engine parts --
before the remains are carted off to the junkyard.

The cleansing of human remains is done in accordance with Jewish law.
The dead are supposed to be buried whole, or as nearly whole as
possible. But it has another result. The blown-up buses are cleansed of
human pain as well, or as nearly as possible. All that remains is the
broken machine, and the machine can be dealt with on its own terms.
Reclaiming parts from the buses is just another example of Egged's
resilience. Even shattered buses can, in a small way, contribute to
keeping the rest of Egged rolling.

Jessica Steinberg (jessica@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) is a journalist based in
Jerusalem.


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What a difference the security fence made...

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