A Roadblock to Peace: Terror on Mass Transit : Fatal Bombings Underscore Bus-Dependent Israelis’ Vulnerability, Slow Negotiations to a Crawl

Dina Balulu has noticed a pattern in the way she handles news of yet another suicide bombing attack on a Tel Aviv bus.

“The first day after the bomb, you get on the bus and you look around at people--at their faces, their bags--and you wonder,” said Balulu, a 30-year-old preschool teacher who rides Tel Aviv buses at least twice a day. “And then, after another day or so, you stop looking. You get used to it. It’s sad, but what can you do?”

Balulu spoke as she rode the No. 20 bus just two days after the latest Palestinian bomber blew up a No. 20 making its way from the suburb of Ramat Gan to downtown Tel Aviv. Six Israelis were killed in the attack and 31 were injured.

In Israel, bus bombings are effective terrorist tactics because every Israeli--unlike every Angeleno--can imagine being one of the victims.

One-quarter of the population--1.5 million Israelis--each day rides the nation’s buses--the backbone of public transportation here. There have been seven suicide bombings by Islamic militants on or near Israeli buses since April, 1994. Sixty-seven Israeli civilians and soldiers, plus an American tourist, have died in the attacks. Scores have been wounded.

The attacks have been effective politically because they have slowed Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations to a crawl and undermined public support for the peace accords that Israel signed with the Palestine Liberation Organization in September, 1993.

But they haven’t changed basic commuting patterns, analysts say.

“Immediately after an attack, the number of passengers drops dramatically,” said Gavriel Shemesh, spokesman for the Dan bus company, which operates in the nation’s crowded coastal plain in and around Tel Aviv. “And then, after a few days, it returns to what it was.”

Even as increasingly affluent Israelis are clogging the nation’s roads with more and more private automobiles, buses remain virtually the only form of mass transit available. Most regular riders simply cannot afford to take taxis or own cars.

Each day, hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren ride public buses to and from school--there is no separate school bus system. Soldiers routinely ride buses to and from their bases, and most of the nation’s workers use buses to get to and from work. Pensioners take buses, as do most new immigrants. Golda Meir may have been the last prime minister to ride the bus regularly, but a sampling of almost every other class of Israeli can be found warming bus seats.

Their very ubiquitousness, Shemesh said, makes buses a prime target.

“During 100 years of Zionism, buses have always been a target,” Shemesh said. During Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, he said, buses were targets for Palestinian fighters desperately trying to stop the establishment of a Jewish state. The twisting road that winds through the mountains leading from the coastal plain to Jerusalem is still littered with bus carcasses, preserved as monuments of the war.

By targeting buses, bombers minimize their chances of being stopped before they can detonate the explosives strapped to their bodies or carried in bags, police say. In a security-minded nation, government buildings, grocery stores, shopping centers and even movie theaters have guards at their doors who search the handbags of each patron. But it is too expensive to place guards on every bus.

The Dan company alone runs 1,400 buses on each of three shifts every day. And it is hard to notice suspicious characters on crowded buses that make frequent stops and continuously change passengers.

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A pair of Islamic militants donned army uniforms to mingle undetected with soldiers at the Beit Lid junction in central Israel in January. The soldiers were taking public buses back to their bases on a Sunday morning after going home on weekend passes. The bombers detonated explosives strapped to their bodies, killing 21 soldiers.

A bomber dressed in street clothes and carrying an innocuous shopping bag blew himself up on Dan’s No. 5 bus in October, 1994, killing 22 people and wounding 48 on Tel Aviv’s fashionable Dizengoff Street.

After Monday’s attack, the Dan company announced that it is training more security guards and will put them on more buses. The guards will search passengers, and both guards and drivers will have the right to order passengers off the bus. But Shemesh said there is simply no way to provide security for every bus on every run each day.

“No country in the world could afford to put a security man in every bus,” he said.

Balulu and her fellow passengers scoffed at the notion of a guard on every bus.

“Here, it is war,” said Ora Koren, who waited for the bus just a few hundred feet from Monday’s attack site. “It is not a situation of peace. In war, things like this happen.

“Life here is simply a certain way--it is not quiet. Every day, something can happen,” said the 50-year-old Russian immigrant, who added that she will continue to ride the bus, as she has since she immigrated here.

Balulu said that her apartment is only a few hundred feet from where the Dizengoff bomb exploded, and her preschool is close to Monday’s explosion site. But she shrugged when asked if she was afraid to keep up her routine of going from one place to the other on the bus.

“It think that it’s fate,” she said. “I’m not scared. One has to take the bus.”