Mel Gibson has blamed his anti-Semitic comments at the time of his July arrest on fear because of the Lebanon-Israeli conflict.

Mel told Good Morning America this week that his assertion that “Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world” was “fear related, OK? So, you know, you have your own fears about these things.”

“Now, maybe it was just that very day that Lebanon and Israel were at it, you know.”

“Since I was a kid in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s and now in the new millennium, you can read of an ever-escalating kind of conflagration over there in the Middle East that … I remember thinking when I was 20, man, that place is going to drag us all into the black hole, you know, just the … the difficulty over there.”

“You start thinking will I ever see my grandchildren grow up? … What’s going to become of the world? What’s going to press the button?”

Interviewer Diane Sawyer pointed out there is a difference from feeling that the Middle East is a “tinderbox” to saying that the Jews were responsible for all war. Mel replied: “Well, strictly speaking, that’s … that’s not true [but] it takes two to tango.”

“What are they responsible for? I think that they’re not blameless in the conflict. There’s been aggression, and retaliation and aggression. It’s just part of being in conflict, and being at war. So, they’re not blameless.”

But Mel accepts that his July statement was inaccurate due to his inebriation: “Now when you’re loaded, you know, the balance of how you see things — it comes out the wrong way. I know that it’s not as black and white as that. I know that you just can’t, you know, roar about things like that. That it’s wrong.”