On November 12, at the Komaba Campus of the University of Tokyo, the Society for the Studies of Nation Issues held the Fifth Special Lecture in its series "Thinking About Ethnic and National Questions," "70 Years Since the Second Arab–Israeli War: Reconnecting Nations and International Politics." Yu Koizumi, a specialist in Russian security, and Hiroyuki Suzuki, a specialist in Middle East area studies, took the Second Arab–Israeli War of 1956 as a starting point to discuss the international politics and ethnic and national questions surrounding the Middle East and Russia.

The lecture began with Mr. Suzuki's explanation of the Second Arab–Israeli War. After noting that differences in each country's perception show in the fact that the war is called the "Sinai War," the "Tripartite Aggression," or the "Suez Crisis" depending on the region, he described it as the war that decided Britain and France's withdrawal from the Middle East and the rise of Arab nationalism under Nasser. Further, emphasizing that Israel for the first time expanded its territory after a ceasefire and placed Gaza under military occupation, and that this became on-the-ground training for its later occupation policy, he characterized it as "the war that closed off peace in the Middle East."

Next, Mr. Koizumi explained Russia's present presence in the Middle East region. He pointed out that the interest of the Soviet Union and Russia has consistently lain in Europe, and that their interventions in the Middle East have been few. He sees the 2015 intervention in Syria, too, as intended less to secure interests in the Middle East itself than to obtain bargaining chips in the confrontation with the West after the Ukraine crisis. However, Russia lacks the capacity to keep deploying military force far from home, so there are limits to its interventions, he said.

The discussion and Q&A took up topics such as Russian immigrants in Israeli society and their influence on the war in Ukraine, relations between Russia and Palestine, the outlook for the flow of arms between the Middle East and Russia, and multipolarization brought about by the rise of China. Finally, it was discussed that the frameworks of nation and state, while artificial and changeable, are nonetheless powerful.

Throughout this lecture, the idea of "war seen from another perspective" often came up, as with the Second Arab–Israeli War within the history of the Cold War, or the Syrian civil war as seen from Russia. It made me keenly aware of the importance of taking in various contexts and the perspectives of other regions, not only staying within the period and region in which I specialize.