Last year, right-wing darling Gen. David Petraeus caused quite a stir among conservatives for endorsing the (seemingly obvious) idea that America’s relationship with Israel and that relationship’s failure to help bring about a lasting peace with the Palestinians damages U.S. interests in the wider Middle East. “Insufficient progress toward a comprehensive Middle East peace,” he said in a statement to Congress, is the first among “a number of cross-cutting issues that serve as major drivers of instability, inter-state tensions, and conflict” that “can serve as root causes of instability or as obstacles to security”:

“The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests in the AOR [area of responsibility]. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. [...] Al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hizballah and Hamas.”

Israel hawks and neocons like to dismiss this line of thinking — so-called “linkage” — because, as CAP’s Matt Duss once noted, they think “the U.S.-Israel relationship exists in a sort of hermetically sealed bubble, separated from the U.S.’s other challenges in the region, generating no negative externalities for U.S. interests.”

But his idea isn’t just an American one. Reporting from the annual Herzliya Conference in Israel, Duss writes that in a keynote address, former foreign minister and current opposition leader Tzipi Livni endorsed linkage:

“I do not believe Israel is the source of extremism in region,but the conflict has influenced both existing peace agreements with our neighbors, and impacted our ability to change reality in region. [...] We don’t have border conflicts with Egypt and Jordan, but this is a cold peace. It is a cold peace because of the linkage between the conflict and our relationship with these countries. … These governments have had to cope with hostile public opinion because of conflict.”

During Israel’s national election campaign in 2009, Livni, running the be the country’s next prime minister, told an American journalist that she would evacuate Jewish settlers in the West Bank in order to achieve peace and advance a Palestinian state. Yet after challenger and now-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he wouldn’t evacuate settlements, Livni was “forced to disassociate herself from the understandings.”

At the same time, Livni seems to understand the impact the settlements have. Referring to the breakdown of direct talks over Netanyahu’s refusal to extend a moratorium on settlement construction in her speech today, Duss adds that Livni said “It’s not a matter of just building a few new houses. We need to choose between that [settlements] and the continuation of negotiations.”

Last Friday, ABC News aired a controversial episode as part of its “What Would You Do?” segment in which a hired actor portrayed a security guard who racially profiled a Latino family in Tucson, Arizona. (The family members were also actors.) The purpose of the skit was to record the reactions of various onlookers with a hidden camera. In all of the situations presented in the segment, witnesses stood up against the racial profiling taking place. The report concludes:

Over two days of filming, we were amazed to see dozens of people stepping up when witnessing racial profiling in action. All kinds of people intervened — in fact, the majority were non-Hispanic. Despite the fact that the anti-immigration law seems popular in Arizona, we didn’t see any evidence of it in this Tucson restaurant.

Watch it:

The Arizona Republic reports that Speaker of the House Kirk Adams sent out a media release demanding ABC retract and apologize for “a fake news story the show produced about Arizona’s new immigration law for the purposes of entertaining viewers with a ‘Candid Camera’ style set-up.” “This is an outrageously inaccurate portrayal of SB-1070 by ABC News,” he said.

In all fairness, SB-1070 does not grant a private security guard the authority to ask anyone about their immigration status. Instead, it requires police to demand proof of legal residency during a legal stop when reasonable suspicion that a person is undocumented exists. That is typically understood to mean that the person being approached about their immigration status must be suspected of breaking some other law before that inquiry takes place.

It’s illegal to impersonate law enforcement, so that’s why ABC carefully avoided that scenario. Meanwhile, SB-1070 establishes a pretty low threshold for what kind of infractions should elicit immigration questioning. A minor traffic violation or a broken tail light could suddenly catapult into an immigration interrogation. Also, since anything from an accent to “dress or appearance” can be used to establish reasonable suspicion that a person is undocumented, the racial profiling taking place in the sketch itself is unfortunately not that far-fetched.

Ultimately, the takeaway of the segment for me wasn’t so much how SB-1070 will be implemented, but rather, how people come to think about its implementation. ABC mentions that “[e]ven though the law triggered a wave of protests, polls showed that over 50 percent of Arizona voters supported the bill.” However, ABC fails to cite the data that makes their whole candid camera stunt noteworthy. Despite the fact that SB-1070′s proponents have claimed otherwise, over 70 percent of all Americans thinks it’s “somewhat” to “very” likely that Latino citizens will be asked for their papers by police who think they are undocumented immigrants. In Arizona, almost half of all voters think the SB-1070 immigration debate has “exposed a deeper sense of racism in our community.” The high level of support for the law seems to imply that the general public is willing to accept these serious drawbacks.

Yet, ABC’s segment suggests that when people actually witness racial profiling, most of them are pretty appalled by it. Granted, it’s certainly possible that the individuals ABC caught on camera aren’t necessarily a representative sample of the electorate. It’s also true that not everyone stood up to defend the people being persecuted. But at least one woman claimed the event changed how she thought about SB-1070, telling ABC that she had “never given a thought to the consequences of the anti-immigration law.” Now, she said, “I’m definitely going to be taking a different view against it.” My guess is she wasn’t the only person who came out feeling that way. As unlikely as it may be that the scenarios depicted by ABC would become the norm under SB-1070, it alarmed at least a few people that something even resembling what was shown could take place in America.

Matt Duss is reporting from the Middle East. This is his second post. You can also follow him on twitter.

Debating the question “Can the World Live With a Nuclear Iran” at the annual Herzliya Conference, Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Brian Katulis said that, while neither the U.S. nor Israel wants it to get to that point, the Obama administration “has been aggressively confronting these challenges.”

Responding to the sense of panic in the room, and in the country, over the prospect of a nuclear Iran, Katulis said, “Let’s remember, in this region of the world, the U.S. and Israel are the strong horses. We can shape events, and we’ve seen a very aggressive approach from this administration working on all fronts.” “After years of passive appeasement of Iran by the Bush administration, we finally have a strategy in place,” Katulis said, “and it’s working to put pressure on Iran.”

Former Mossad chief Efraim Halevi responded to the debate question by asking, “What does it mean to say that world cannot live with nuclear Iran? That the world will de-nuclearize Iran? That it will forestall a nuclear Iran? What might be the price for such a policy? Is there no price one will not pay to prevent a nuclear Iran?”

“We will do everything we can to prevent a nuclear Iran, within confines of sane policy,” Halevi continued, indicating that he did not consider military strikes within that category. Halevi also declared it important to understand that “The U.S. and Israel are winning this war… Israel is in a situation in which it is one of the most powerful forces in the Middle East, [yet] we have this inferiority complex.”

Former Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Efraim Sneh scoffed at the current sanctions on Iran — “We don’t need tickling sanctions, we need crippling sanctions!” — and said that an Iran with a nuclear weapon would be far more aggressive. “As for whether Israel can live with nuclear Iran,” Sneh said, “the answer is clear: No.”

Confessing that she “didn’t think there be much debate up here,” Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute, said, “I understand the propaganda effect of saying we’re winning. But if Iran is losing, I’d like to be that kind of loser.” Pletka said that she didn’t think a nuclear Iran would be containable, referring to former Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini’s claim that “Israel as a one bomb country.”

“What I’m saying is not propaganda,” Halevi responded, “but the danger is falling into believing the propaganda of others.” Halevi said that “Israel today is not the Jews in the 1930’s… To compare us to the Holocaust, the idea that we’re in similar danger,” is wrong. The destruction of Israel “will not happen,” Halevi insisted, “not because we simply say it, but because we have means to prevent it.”

Over the weekend, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s hand-picked envoy to Egypt, former U.S. diplomat Frank Wisner, caused a diplomatic row when he suggested at the Munich Security Conference that embattled Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak “must stay in office in order to steer [democratic] changes through.” Wisner’s comments were quickly rebuked by the Obama administration, which said that he was speaking as a private citizen and not as a diplomatic envoy.

Now, the U.K Independent’s Robert Fisk has discovered a major conflict of interest that may explain why Wisner was so comfortable with suggesting that Mubarak — who has more than a million of protesters calling on him to step down over the past two weeks — should stay in power during a transition period. Fisk has found that Wisner works for Patton Boggs, a New York-DC law firm that includes in its client list none other than the Egyptian government itself. Patton Boggs even took part in litigation against Americans on behalf of the Egyptian government:

Frank Wisner, President Barack Obama’s envoy to Cairo who infuriated the White House this weekend by urging Hosni Mubarak to remain President of Egypt, works for a New York and Washington law firm which works for the dictator’s own Egyptian government. … But there is nothing “personal” about Mr Wisner’s connections with the litigation firm Patton Boggs, which openly boasts that it advises “the Egyptian military, the Egyptian Economic Development Agency, and has handled arbitrations and litigation on the [Mubarak] government’s behalf in Europe and the US.”

Patton Boggs states that its attorneys “represent some of the leading Egyptian commercial families and their companies” and “have been involved in oil and gas and telecommunications infrastructure projects on their behalf.” One of its partners served as chairman of the US-Egyptian Chamber of Commerce promoting foreign investment in the Egyptian economy. The company has also managed contractor disputes in military-sales agreements arising under the US Foreign Military Sales Act. Washington gives around $1.3bn (£800m) a year to the Egyptian military.

A perusal of Patton Boggs’s website finds that firm “maintains a correspondent affiliate relationship with one of Egypt’s most prominent firm of lawyers in Cairo, the law firm of Zaki Hashem.” Fisk notes that one of Hashem’s former senior advisors, Nabil al-Araby, has actually been taking part in protests against Mubarak. Al-Araby broke off connections with Hashem three years ago, and told Fisk that he thinks that Mubarak must go immediately and that he has “no idea” why Wisner made comments in support of him staying.

Nicholas Noe, a Beirut-based political researcher who has advised Clinton in the past, told Fisk that he’s concerned about “the idea that the US is now subcontracting or ‘privatising’ crisis management…Do the US lack diplomats?” Indeed, while Wisner has decades of experience working as a U.S. diplomat in the Middle East, he now works in the private sector, and it is a questionable choice to pick someone whose firm has litigated on behalf of the Egyptian government to be the American envoy to that same country.

Matt Duss is reporting from the Middle East. You can also follow him on twitter.

Delivering a keynote address earlier today at Israel’s annual Herzliya Conference, former foreign minister and current opposition leader Tzipi Livni leveled sharp criticism at the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “We need to be unified, but I don’t believe in unity based on fear,” Livni said. “I don’t believe in a leadership that benefits from fear.” Israel’s current leadership, Livni continued, “cannot explain its vision, or its lack of vision.”

Referring to the breakdown of direct talks over Netanyahu’s refusal to extend a moratorium on settlement construction, Livni said “It’s not a matter of just building a few new houses. We need to choose between that [settlements] and the continuation of negotiations.”

Stressing the need for a two-state solution — “Not because it’s some thing the Americans want, or as a favor to the Palestinians, but as our decision to secure our existence as a Jewish, democratic state” — Livni asked, “How long can we keep telling the world Israel is the only democracy when we continue to live in the territories, where there is a place where the government rules and where the Army rules? We can’t live on in this limbo.”

Notably, Livni also endorsed “linkage,” the idea that the continuing irresolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict generates resentment and undermines moderates in the region, an argument that many on the Israeli and American right reject. “I do not believe Israel is the source of extremism in region,” Livni said, “but the conflict has influenced both existing peace agreements with our neighbors, and impacted our ability to change reality in region”:

We don’t have border conflicts with Egypt and Jordan, but this is a cold peace. It is a cold peace because of the linkage between the conflict and our relationship with these countries… These governments have had to cope with hostile public opinion because of the conflict.

This is Herzliya’s 11th annual policy conference. In addition to bringing together national security professionals from around the world, it’s also become a regular stop for American politicians looking to burnish their foreign policy credentials. Mitt Romney, spoke there in 2007, as did John Edwards. This year, likely Republican presidential candidate Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour will speak on February 9, concluding a panel on sanctions on Iran.