Driving in the Valley of the Shadow of Death

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).