THOUSANDS RALLY TO PROTEST TREATMENT OF PALESTINIANS

Shukri Saliba, a Palestinian American from Vienna, has become a captive of the network news. The recent scenes from the dusty streets and stone houses of his homeland often move him to tears.

In the past few weeks, Saliba, 21, says he "saw four Israeli soldiers beating two Palestinian youths with clubs. Tears came to my eyes. I felt like somebody was beating my brother."

Saliba was one of thousands of demonstrators who converged on Lafayette Square yesterday on the eve of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's visit to Washington. They had come to protest the 20 years of Israeli occupation on the Gaza Strip and West Bank and the killings of at least 87 Palestinians during the past three months of uprising. U.S. Park Police estimated the crowd at 1,500 to 2,000, and said no arrests were made.

The corner of 15th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW was a sea of signs, many of them highlighted by the red, green, black and white of the Palestine Liberation Organization, as speakers and singers hailed the PLO and denounced U.S. funding to Israel.

Steve Abed, a 20-year-old junior from Rutgers University in New Jersey, stood holding high a poster that depicted two bearded Palestinian men, one of them cradling the charred body of a boy.

"Before the last few months, Americans had no idea of what was going on in Israel," said Abed, as chants of "End Occupation Now" rang through the air under a cloudy sky.

Adib Khatib, a professor at the Najah National University, said he has seen the violence of the land firsthand.

"One night a group of soldiers broke into a house," Khatib, 39, recalled.

"The woman and the girl who live there, they started to shout when the soldiers started to drag their baby boy down the stairs. The lady and the girl tried to stop them. So the soldiers beat the woman and the girl without mercy. I saw this with my own eyes.

"What you see on television is one-tenth of what is going," he said.

Khatib and others interviewed at the rally were skeptical of Shamir's visit and Secretary of State George P. Shultz's recent proposal for peace.

Hassan Abdul Rahman, one of the top PLO representatives in the United States, echoed the feeling of many demonstrators saying that the Shultz plan will fail because it excludes what he said was the Palestinians' only voice -- the PLO -- and does not address the issue of a Palestinian homeland.

"Yes, there is a great deal of suffering and pain," Rahman told the crowd near the beginning of what would be a heated speech. "Israeli fascist soldiers and settlers beat the children. But they cannot destroy the Palestinian will . . . . The Palestinian problems will not be solved on the streets of Washington. It will be decided on the streets of Jerusalem."

The goal of the rally, which was sponsored by a consortium of groups, was in part to continue drawing attention to the plight of the 1.5 million Palestinians who inhabit the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and to change American perceptions of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

In addition to the rally, the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee held a conference at the Marriott Crystal Gateway, and the Friends of Peace Now, touted as Israel's largest force for a negotiated settlement on the Palestinian question, held a teach-in at American University.

Some said the American attitude has already begun to change.

"I think this has changed the way some Americans view Israel," said Saliba. "They are starting to see that it is not always the Palestinians who are the aggressors."

"The American people are good people, but they are misinformed," said Khatib.

"When they know the truth, they will step forward."

Several speakers and onlookers also said the rally was to show solidarity among Palestinian Americans and to send messages of support to their relatives thousands of miles away.

"The only way to show them {the Palestinians} that we support them is through a demonstration like this," said Saliba.

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.