John Mearsheimer

And I would argue in the end, if anything, it's going to foster anti-Semitism.

I think you don't want to run around telling people that they can't talk about Israel without being called an anti-Semite.

It's just not healthy in terms of the issue that you're raising, right?

But I still agree with you that it is a tricky issue.

I don't want to make light of that.

You know, I know that there's this piece of literature out there called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

And I fully understand that if you're not careful, you can come close to writing Volume 2, The Protocols.

But I don't believe that we wrote anything that was even close to that.

And again, I think that a healthy debate on the issues that we were raising would have been not only in America's interest, but it would have been in Israel's interest.

Well, just to make a general point on this issue, in our conversation here today, you often talk about individual leaders and leaders.

the word individual often pops up in your vocabulary.

I believe that we are ultimately social animals before we are individuals.

I believe we're born into tribes, we're heavily socialized, and that we carve out space for our individualism.

But we are part of tribes, or social groups, or nations, call them what you want, ethnic groups.

religious groups.

But the fact is that these tribes often crash into each other.

And when they crash into each other, they end up hating each other.

If you go to a place like Bosnia, right, the Croats and the Serbs, oh my God, and then throw in the Bosniaks or

which is the term for Bosnian Muslims.

And, you know, Muslims, Croats, Serbs.