The story
Egged was created in 1933 through a merger of four smaller intercity bus cooperatives in and around Tel Aviv. In 1942, it was joined with the bus company United Sharon. In 1951, Egged merged with the Northern Shahar bus company and the Southern Drom Yehuda bus company, creating a national public transportation network. In 1961, Egged merged with the Hamekasher bus company of Jerusalem. The name Egged (lit. Union) was given to the cooperative by the Israeli poet Hayim Nahman Bialik.
During the wars of 1956, 1967 and 1973, Egged buses and drivers helped to reinforce the logistics system of the IDF and drove soldiers and food to the battlefields. Some buses also served as ambulances to transport injured soldiers and civilians. In several cases, Egged buses were also used to facilitate the expulsion of Palestinian residents of the West Bank, such as from the villages of Qalqilyah, Imwas, Yalo and Bayt Nuba during the Six-Day War. According to Israeli historian Adam Raz, Egged's Head of Traffic Department during the war, Yaakov Mali, was quoted in an archival document as saying, "He (Kfar Sava Mayor Ze'ev Geller) ordered 40 buses from me to expel the residents of Qalqilyah to the Jordan crossings," testifying that he replied he only accepted orders from the IDF. Geller responded that there was "a historic opportunity to get rid of as many Arabs as possible and that at that very moment, the IDF was blowing up houses in Qalqilyah."
In late 2002, Egged sued the Palestinian National Authority and its chairman Yasser Arafat for compensation of damages and loss of income due to terrorist attacks and suicide bombings on buses during the Second Intifada, as the attacks had deterred passengers from taking buses. On February 3, 2003, the Tel Aviv District Court ruled that Arafat had to pay Egged NIS 52 million in damages for the loss of one year's income and NIS 100,000 in court expenses.
Despite deregulation attempts by the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Egged is still Israel's largest bus company, is subsidized by the government, and still controls most of the inter-city bus lines in Israel. Netanyahu's attempts were cut short by a bus strike that brought the country to a halt. However, in recent years, bus service has begun to be operated by smaller bus companies such as Dan, Kavim, Superbus, Connex and others. In 2005, Egged and the Israeli Government reached an agreement under which by the year 2015 subsidization will be reduced to specific sectors, the disabled, soldiers and students, and for certain equipment.
In 2019, members voted overwhelmingly to convert Egged into a company from a worker cooperative. Had its members voted to not convert its ownership structure, the government could have cancelled an operating agreement it signed with Egged in November 2018, tender out its routes, and imposed various sanctions until it decided to convert into a company.
History of attacks
Egged buses and their passengers have been victims of acts of terrorism quite a few times, including:
Fajja bus attacks - November 30, 1947: An attack by Palestinian terrorists on an Egged bus traveling from Netanya to Jerusalem, in which five bus passengers were killed.
Ma'ale Akrabim massacre (Scorpions’ Pass Massacre)- March 17, 1954: a shooting attack by Palestinian Terrorists in which 12 passengers of an Egged bus were killed in Akrabbim.
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Coastal Road massacre - March 11, 1978: Palestinian terrorists took over an Egged bus, and at the end of a struggle between the terrorists and the police, 35 of the bus passengers were killed.
Tel Aviv–Jerusalem bus 405 suicide attack - July 6, 1989: A Palestinian terrorist named Abed al-Hadi Ghanem, funded by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, derailed an Egged bus on route 405 into an abyss near Kiryat Ye'arim. 16 people died, including an American and 2 Canadians.
Haifa bus 37 suicide bombing - March 5, 2003: a suicide attack by a Hamas terrorist on Moriah Avenue in the Achoza neighborhood in Haifa. 17 people were killed in the attack.
The Second Intifada: During the Second Intifada, suicide attacks on buses were a major form of terrorism, resulting in hundreds of deaths.
From Wikipedia’s article on Egged (company), shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4