The First Session held on February 25th 2000 in Beit Sahour

On Friday, February 25th, 31 Palestinian youth, 17 from the Palestinian area and 14 from Israel, met at the Rapprochement center starting the first step of this project. The day started by the arrival of 14 Palestinians living in Haifa at around 11:30 a.m. Most of our group from Beit Sahour and

"We are one people, and the occupation managed to partly separate us, but we will come together, sooner or later, and this is the beginning" said one of the Participants

Bethlehem and Ramallah were at the PCR office where we had a short introduction to each other and an introduction to PCR. This lasted for one hour because there was a discussion about some of the activities that PCR is conducting with the Israelis, and there were some questions raised about the East Jerusalem Housing Project by some of the Palestinians in Israel. The group then headed to Bethlehem University where we had a tour in the University and an introduction to the university about the students and the political situation there by some of the participants from Bethlehem University, who joined the big group there. After spending about one hour in the University, we walked through Bethlehem to the Manger Square were we had lunch together in a popular restaurant.

The group visited the Church of Nativity and went down to Beit Sahour to the office. At the PCR office, we had a deeper acknowledgement to each other because we want the participants to know each other more before getting into political discussions. After that, we divided the group into three discussion groups and asked them to talk about their expectations and concerns about the project. This activity lasted for about one and a half hour, and we concluded the session by listening to each group’s discussions presented by one of the members of each group.

Most of the comments were, that they prefer if the sessions will be longer than a one-day meeting, and they expressed that they would rather to have two days and a stay over in Beit Sahour or Haifa for some of the sessions. Some of them discussed why it is important to have such a program and all of them agreed that this kind of a program is needed for the young people, because the discovered that both are really illiterate in terms of how much do we really know about each other. Therefore, they insisted that this program should continue and be more focused on issues with common interest and be educational and cultural at the same time.