“Having four Palestinians and four Israelis together on a mountain in Antarctica sounds like the beginning of a joke,” said Doron Erel in a speech about an expedition promoting peace between the Jewish and Muslim communities. “I guess the punch line is that it was real.”
Erel, an Israeli, recounted his Antarctic adventure with four Palestinians and three other Israelis. They climbed a mountain and named it the Mountain of Israeli-Palestinian Friendship. Students for Israel, Muslim-cultural Students Association, Hillel Cultural Life, and the student group Peace of Mind sponsored the hour-long presentation Wednesday.
Speaking to about 40 students at Norris University Center, Erel presented slides from the trip as well as the first minutes of a documentary that was filmed during the 40-day trek.
The goal of the expedition was to show that Israelis and Palestinians could work as a team by climbing an unnamed mountain and then pronouncing it as the first step in a journey to end violence in the Middle East.
“The reasons for the trip were that we wanted to do a crazy expedition to attract all of the media and that we wanted it to be a long and intense journey,” Erel said. “We wanted to be one team and work as one team.”
Two years after he became the first Israeli to climb Mount Everest, a friend approached him with the idea of uniting people from Israel and Palestine to work as a group.
The friend contacted political leaders throughout the Middle East and Asia, including Yasser Arafat, Mikhail Gorbachev and the Dalai Lama. Erel’s task was to find climbers willing to make the trek.
“I used any connections I had to find people and make phone calls,” Erel said. “As I was calling people, I realized that it was a strange story to ask people, ‘Do you want to climb a mountain in Antarctica?'”
Despite the participants’ efforts to heal religious divisions, political disagreements arose within the group. But in the end, they were able to better see the other side’s point of view.
“On the one hand, we had to work together, but on the other hand we had a lot of heated public arguments,” he said. “When you listen to the stories, they’re not the enemy anymore, it’s a person.”
Erel spoke about two Palestinians on the expedition who helped him climb the mountain by pulling him out of a rough spot.
“I had total trust in them. It didn’t even cross my mind that someone would come to an expedition and do harm to any of us,” Erel said.
During the group’s political discussions, members agreed that peace is achievable if people are willing to listen.
“We cannot sit and wait for the government to do work for us,” Erel said. “Peace can only be made by the people, not the government.”
Shelley Banjo, a member of Students for Israel and Daily staffer, was the main organizer for the event. She said it is difficult to get students at a campus like Northwestern interested in international issues.
“We got a really great turnout here and hopefully we can get people interested in the Israel and the Middle East conflict,” said Banjo, a Medill sophomore.
Jason Wagner, an Education sophomore and president of Students for Israel, said the event brought together groups that don’t normally work together.
“We were able to (establish) an exciting new view about facilitating dialogue regarding the peace process,” he said.
Education junior Eric Fingerman said he attended the event because the topic held some interest for him. He said he now hopes to get the chance to visit Israel.
“It’s changed my view a little about the relations between Palestinian and Israeli people,” Fingerman said. “The thing that struck me was how one of the members of the expedition had a brother who was killed and another member had been in jail for planting a bomb.”
Reach Marcy Miranda at [email protected].
