Ms. Keiko Sakai is one of the few Iraq specialists in Japan. Her books are very interesting. I have read her books more than once. 

Among her books, "Middle East Issues" (Kodansha Gendai Shinsho) is broad in scope and she is making a large-scale analysis on the issues from the international politics points of view, while considering what kind of societies the people are seeking and trying to build in the Middle East region. She discusses on themes, such as "the Palestinian problem" or "the influence of the cold war and its end in the Middle East". Although the issues are quite complicated, we can follow what happened and why. 

What is interesting to me is that there are many conflicts of seemingly religious or cultural confrontations, which are nothing more than mere power or wealth struggles. Therefore, if we attribute the difficulties of the conflicts to the cultural or religious differences, we cannot see the root cause of the issues. 

For instance, Japanese tend to think most Arabs are Muslims, but there are many Christian Arabs in the eastern area of the Mediterranean, or before the foundation of the state of Israel, there were many Jews in Morocco, Iraq or Yemen. And in Muslim countries, Christians and Jews were enjoying their autonomy as "People of the Book". (I was very surprised at this!) 

As I wrote yesterday, the Arab revolt was a military uprising against the Ottoman Empire, and the Arabs were supported by the British. But the modern concept of the "nation state" is foreign to the Arabs. Across the regions, the Arabs had shared the sense of common territory, where they can freely move. 

When such territory was divided into small nations such as Iraq or Syria, their backslash against the European countries increased. 

And this was the reason for the Arab nationalism, which asserts the unity of the Arabs regardless of the differences in religion such as Muslims or Christians. Based on this logic, it is no wonder why the foundation of Israel for the religious identity is unpalatable.