"There Was a Bomb on My Bus"

Published in Teen, April 1996

"My lungs hurt badly, and I couldn't breathe. My hair was burnt off, my face was all burnt, and my shirt was burnt off. All I could smell was burning."

Terrorism draws people into political violence whose everyday lives have nothing to do with politics. Sometimes, this violence touches teenagers or even younger children.

Nowhere have attacks on innocent people been more evident than in Israel. The modern-day struggle between Arabs and Jews to control the land of Palestine, on which Israel was founded in 1948, started near the beginning of the twentieth century, although borders within the region have been dis puted for many generations. The battle has included both con ventional wars fought by government soldiers and terrorist attacks. The last full-scale Arab-Israeli war was fought in 1973. Since then, Arab...