When our plane landed at Newark, N.J., everybody with a cell phone flicked theirs on. The aisles buzzed with the news. Suicide bombing. Sixteen dead. Beersheba. Two buses. Maybe 100 wounded.

I pieced the fragmented information together. Damn, damn, damn.

I was returning from a long week in Israel and Palestine with Arun Gandhi, grandson of the Mahatma, spreading a message of peace, hoping to spark a nonviolent resurgence. Now this.

The Palestinians I met were enthusiastic and optimistic about adopting nonviolent resistance. I attended rallies, speeches and one-on-one meetings, including sessions with President Yasser Arafat, Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia and the Palestinian Legislative Council. We met with countless mayors, governors and just plain folks. Every one seemed to embrace the message that peace, justice and freedom could be achieved nonviolently.

The organizers were astonished. Never before had some of these officials uttered, in public, the words "nonviolence" or "peace." And to get almost 10,000 people in Ramallah for a peace rally, 5,000 in Abu Dis — unheard of!

At the candlelight prayer vigil in Bethlehem, Manger Square was filled to bursting. A rabbi prayed for peace, and the people cheered. Palestinians applauding a rabbi: That's a first.

Last Sunday, shopkeepers went on strike, a tactic that has lain dormant since the first intifada more than a decade ago. When I left, the prisoners' hunger strike was in its second week but has since ended. There was talk about what to do next. More rallies. Perhaps a selective boycott of Israeli goods. Gandhi's suggestion of refugees silently marching to their father's villages captured everyone's imagination.

And then a suicide bombing. So what went wrong? Nothing, and everything. The majority of Palestinians are nonviolent. They, too, are being held hostage by the small percentage of their countrymen who plan, conduct and condone violence.

There are 135,000 Palestinians living in Hebron. The Hamas cell there that planned and executed this latest atrocity in Beersheba numbers, according to Israeli intelligence, 100 people, most members of the same extended family. Because of the actions of these hundred, the other 134,900 will endure roadblocks, checkpoints, curfews, closures, home demolitions and an acceleration of the building of the wall separating Hebron from the Negev.

And so it is with every suicide bombing. It is Israeli deaths that make the news (and I lament their deaths with every fiber of my being), but the Palestinians die and suffer, too.

Most news reports accurately stated that Palestinian groups had not carried out a major attack inside Israel since March 14, when 11 Israelis were killed in the port of Ashdod in retaliation for the assassinations of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and his successor, Abdel Aziz Rantisi.

These reports then claim that this latest attack occurred at the end of "a peaceful summer." Peaceful for the Israelis, perhaps, but not for the Palestinians. According to the Red Crescent, 436 Palestinians have been killed since March 14. In August alone, Israeli forces killed 43 Palestinians and injured 285.

Just before I arrived, two elderly Palestinians were killed and 13 Palestinians and six Israeli soldiers were wounded when a car rigged with explosives blew up at the Kalandya checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem. I passed through that checkpoint with Palestinian friends three times during my visit, frightened of both the nervous young soldiers pointing their semiautomatic weapons at me as I shuffled through the cattle chute and the possibility of another car bomb.

The suicide bombers are terrorizing their own people, too.

Palestinians understand that violence is counterproductive. Last week's bombings were condemned by the Palestinian Authority, which acknowledged, "National interests require not to harm civilians in order not to give Israel the pretexts to continue its military aggression against the Palestinian people and their holy sites."

Yet more than 500 Palestinian children have been killed in this intifada. According to the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem, 300 of those were killed between September and December 2000, before one bullet was fired, before one bomb was exploded by any Palestinian.

The cessation of Palestinian violence is no guarantee of the cessation of Israeli violence. But, as the PA clearly understands, it provides the justification. Palestinians have it in their power to strip away the excuse of righteous defense and expose the brutal occupation for what it is. Nonviolent resistance is not just a path, it is the only path Palestinians can follow to obtain peace and freedom.

Susan Ives can be reached at suives@texas.net.