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(Reuters) - Major world powers have begun talks about a United Nations Security Council resolution to lift U.N. sanctions on Iran if a nuclear agreement is struck with Tehran, a step that could make it harder for the U.S. Congress to undo a deal, Western officials said. The talks between Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — the five permanent members of the Security Council — plus Germany and Iran, are taking place ahead of difficult negotiations that resume next week over constricting Iran's nuclear ability.Some eight U.N. resolutions - four of them imposing sanctions - ban Iran from uranium enrichment and other sensitive atomic work and bar it from buying and selling atomic technology and anything linked to ballistic missiles. There is also a U.N. arms embargo.Iran sees their removal as crucial as U.N. measures are a legal basis for more stringent U.S. and European Union measures to be enforced. The U.S. and EU often cite violations of the U.N. ban on enrichment and other sensitive nuclear work as justification for imposing additional penalties on Iran.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told Congress on Wednesday that an Iran nuclear deal would not be legally binding, meaning future U.S. presidents could decide not to implement it. That point was emphasized in an open letter by 47 Republican senators sent on Monday to Iran's leaders asserting any deal could be discarded once President Barack Obama leaves office in January 2017.But a Security Council resolution on a nuclear deal with Iran could be legally binding, say Western diplomatic officials. That could complicate and possibly undercut future attempts by Republicans in Washington to unravel an agreement.Iran and the six powers are aiming to complete the framework of a nuclear deal by the end of March, and achieve a full agreement by June 30, to curb Iran's most sensitive nuclear activities for at least 10 years in exchange for a gradual end to all sanctions on the Islamic Republic.So far, those talks have focused on separate U.S. and European Union sanctions on Iran's energy and financial sectors, which Tehran desperately wants removed. The sanctions question is a sticking point in the talks that resume next week in Lausanne, Switzerland, between Iran and the six powers.

But Western officials involved in the negotiations said they are also discussing elements to include in a draft resolution for the 15-nation Security Council to begin easing U.N. nuclear-related sanctions that have been in place since December 2006."If there's a nuclear deal, and that's still a big 'if', we'll want to move quickly on the U.N. sanctions issue," an official said, requesting anonymity.The negotiations are taking place at senior foreign ministry level at the six powers and Iran, and not at the United Nations in New York.

But if this is an indication that Clinton will pursue the usual hardline policies calculated to pander to Israel’s most extreme supporters, it is also a sign that she, like other mainstream US politicians, is moving away from large segments of the US public, particularly the base of her own Democratic Party. This is illustrated in a poll from Bloomberg Politics, published Wednesday. Here are the key highlights: Israel has become a deeply partisan issue for ordinary Americans as well as for politicians in Washington, a shift that may represent a watershed moment in foreign policy and carry implications for domestic politics after decades of general bipartisan consensus. Republicans by a ratio of more than 2-to-1 say the US should support Israel even when its stances diverge with American interests, a new Bloomberg Politics poll finds. Democrats, by roughly the same ratio, say the opposite is true and that the US must pursue its own interests over Israel’s.

Further illustrating how sharply partisan the debate has become, Republicans say they feel more sympathetic to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu than to their own president, 67 percent to 16 percent, while Democrats are more sympathetic to President Barack Obama than to Israel’s prime minister, 76 percent to 9 percent. The survey also highlights how differently the nuclear negotiations with Iran are seen between Republicans and Democrats. Democrats, by a nearly 3-to-1 ratio, said they were more optimistic than pessimistic that a tentative deal with Iran announced this month will contain Iran’s ability to get nuclear weapons and thus make the world safer.

By a 2-to-1 margin, Republicans were more pessimistic than optimistic about the impacts of a deal. Majorities of Americans in both parties say any deal Obama makes with Iran should be subject to congressional approval, and that Iran is an unreliable negotiating partner because it is a religious theocracy.

With the deadline for a historic deal on Iran’s nuclear program fast approaching, analysts have begun to speculate whether the wild card after months of delicate diplomacy may not, in fact, be the usual suspects: hard-liners in Tehran, hawks on Capitol Hill or Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been on an eleventh-hour push to thwart the deal. Instead, they say, all eyes are on Europe's "bad cop" on Iran: France.

The European Union's move to label goods produced in Israeli settlements is the latest expression of international disapproval of one of the country's most controversial policies. The Palestinians view Jewish settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem as a major obstacle to reaching any two-state solution, saying they carve up lands expected to form a future Palestinian state. Virtually the entire international community, including the United States, views the settlements as illegal or illegitimate. Israel has long dismissed the criticism, saying most settlement growth is in areas it expects to keep in any future peace agreement and that the issue should be resolved in peace talks along with other core issues like security and borders. Many Israelis want to keep the West Bank and east Jerusalem -- territories captured from Jordan in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war -- citing security concerns as well as the deep religious significance of the territories for devout Jews.

The settlements are now home to more than 570,000 Israelis, according to the Israeli anti-settlement watchdog Peace Now. They range from small wildcat outposts on West Bank hilltops to fully developed towns with shopping malls, schools and suburban homes. Many Israelis choose to live in settlements for economic and quality-of-life reasons. Some 2.2 million Palestinians live in the West Bank, with another 300,000 in east Jerusalem.

— In 1972 there were just over 10,000 Israeli settlers, with 1,500 living in the West Bank and the rest in east Jerusalem. — Twenty years later, ahead of the Oslo peace accords between Israel and the Palestinians, there were 231,200 Israelis living in the territories, with 105,400 in the West Bank and 125,800 in east Jerusalem. — At the end of 2000, when the second Palestinian uprising began, over 365,000 Israelis lived in the territories with more than 198,000 in the West Bank and some 167,000 in east Jerusalem. — In 2008, the year before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took office, over 474,000 Israelis were living in the two territories, with about 281,000 in the West Bank and some 193,000 in east Jerusalem. — Some 570,700 settlers now live in the territories, according to the latest Peace Now figures from the end of 2014, with 370,700 in the West Bank and 200,000 in east Jerusalem.

MERICAN AND BRITISH INTELLIGENCE secretly tapped into live video feeds from Israeli drones and fighter jets, monitoring military operations in Gaza, watching for a potential strike against Iran, and keeping tabs on the drone technology Israel exports around the world. Under a classified program code-named “Anarchist,” the U.K.’s Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, working with the National Security Agency, systematically targeted Israeli drones from a mountaintop on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. GCHQ files provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden include a series of “Anarchist snapshots” — thumbnail images from videos recorded by drone cameras. The files also show location data mapping the flight paths of the aircraft. In essence, U.S. and British agencies stole a bird’s-eye view from the drones.

Several of the snapshots, a subset collected in 2009 and 2010, appear to show drones carrying missiles. Although they are not clear enough to be conclusive, the images offer rare visual evidence to support reports that Israel flies attack drones — an open secret that the Israeli government won’t acknowledge. “There’s a good chance that we are looking at the first images of an armed Israeli drone in the public domain,” said Chris Woods, author of Sudden Justice, a history of drone warfare. “They’ve gone to extraordinary lengths to suppress information on weaponized drones.” The Intercept is publishing a selection of the drone snapshots in an accompanying article.

Additionally, in 2012, a GCHQ analyst reported “regular collects of Heron TP carrying weapons,” referring to a giant drone made by the state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries, known as IAI. Anarchist operated from a Royal Air Force installation in the Troodos Mountains, near Mount Olympus, the highest point on Cyprus. The Troodos site “has long been regarded as a ‘Jewel in the Crown’ by NSA as it offers unique access to the Levant, North Africa, and Turkey,” according to an article from GCHQ’s internal wiki. Last August, The Intercept published a portion of a GCHQ document that revealed that NSA and GCHQ tracked weapons signals from Troodos, and earlier reporting on the Snowden documents indicated that the NSA targeted Israeli drones and an Israeli missile system for tracking, but the details of the operations have not been previously disclosed. “This access is indispensable for maintaining an understanding of Israeli military training and operations and thus an insight to possible future developments in the region,” a GCHQ report from 2008 enthused. “In times of crisis this access is critical and one of the only avenues to provide up to the minute information and support to U.S. and Allied operations in the area.”

The results of the very detailed Pew poll of Israeli citizens tends to confirm that the country is going in a very negative direction, particularly with respect to Arab-Jewish relations. The entire report, “Israel’s Religiously Divided Society,” bears close reading. Based on interviews with nearly 6,000 Israeli adults—Jews, Christians, Muslims, Arabs, and Druze—the poll was conducted between mid-October 2014, and last May, well before the Arab-Jewish violence that began last fall. The headline is the finding that a 48% plurality of Israeli Jews agreed with the statement, “Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel.” One in five (21%) said they agreed “strongly.” Only 46 percent disagreed with the proposition. More religious and less-educated Jews tended to agree in higher percentages than secular Jews. Most troubling for the future, respondents under the age of 50 tended to agree somewhat more (49-44%) than those 50 and older. (However, there has been some criticism of the vagueness of the question.) A no less disturbing finding was that 79% of Israeli Jews agreed with the proposition that Jews “deserve preferential treatment” in Israel. Although religious Jews supported that notion overwhelmingly, nearly seven out of ten self-described secular Jews also backed that notion. As Shibley Telhami (one of the many consultants who helped design the survey) pointed out after citing this result, “so much for the notion of democracy with full equal rights for all its citizens.” Indeed, if this is what Netanyahu means when he demands that Israel be recognized as “the nation state of the Jewish people,” it would be very difficult to square it with conventional notions of democratic governance or equality before the law.

More than three-quarters of Israeli Jews seem to be blind to this contradiction for they see democracy as compatible with the idea of a “Jewish state.” Unsurprisingly, however, nearly two-thirds of Israel’s Arab and Druse citizens disagree.

The poll also found a rather dramatic plunge in optimism among Arab citizens that peaceful coexistence between Israel and an independent Palestinian state is possible. In 2013, Pew found that 74% of Israeli Arabs agreed that such a possibility was real. The most recent finding (which is almost one year old now) found that only 50% of Arab citizens share that belief. That is much closer to the 43% of Jewish Israelis who believe that coexistence is possible.

A group of Palestinians and Palestinian Americans are seeking $34.5 billion dollars in damages from wealthy individuals and companies they accuse of financing and profiting from Israel’s settlements in the occupied West Bank and other abuses of their rights. The plaintiffs include Palestinians who have lost family members in Israeli attacks in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Their lawsuit is the latest effort to expose and curb the role of organizations that operate as tax-exempt US charities in fueling violence and settlement expansion on occupied Palestinian land. It names as defendants US tycoons Sheldon Adelson, Haim Saban, Irving Moskowitz and Oracle founder Lawrence Ellison.

Adelson is renowned for using his huge casino fortune to advance his pro-Israel political agenda and is a major financial backer of both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the US Republican Party. Saban has donated millions of dollars to US Democratic Party presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton. Moskowitz is one of the main financiers of settler efforts to force Palestinians out of their homes in occupied East Jerusalem. The lawsuit also names Israeli diamond magnate and settlement builder Lev Leviev and Christians United for Israel founder, the US Evangelical pastor John Hagee. Twelve US-based charities and a number of Israeli and US corporations are also named as defendants. The charities include Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, The Hebron Fund and Christian Friends of Israeli Communities.

The plaintiffs, represented by the law firm Martin McMahon and Associates, allege that the defendants are directly responsible for violence and for the expansion of settlements. The lawsuit, filed in a Washington, DC, federal court on Monday, alleges a wide range of crimes under US and international law, including genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, conspiracy, money laundering, racketeering, perjury and pillage. It alleges that charitable donations are sent to the Israeli army, a violation of US laws against funding a foreign military. Last December, some of the same plaintiffs using the same law firm sued the US Treasury for allowing billions of dollars of tax-exempt donations to flow to Israeli settlements. This lawsuit targets those who are supplying the money. Several are powerful billionaires who the lawsuit contends have defrauded the US tax authorities by funnelling huge sums of money meant for illegal purposes through tax-exempt organizations. According to the lawsuit, approximately $1 billion is sent through these organizations each year, with $104 million going to the Israeli army in 2014.

Yesterday Hillary Clinton gave a speech in Washington at the Saban Forum of Brookings that included more pandering to Israel than any speech I’ve heard from any American politician. It was endless. Israel is a brave democracy, a light unto the nations, a miracle, its “prowess in war” is “inspiring,” and we must take the US-Israel relationship to the “next level.”

Just as the Republican candidates had attacked Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) at the Republican Jewish Coalition last week, Clinton said that BDS was hurting the U.S.’s ability to fight terrorism. This is language straight out of Benjamin Netanyahu’s office. Speaking of Netanyahu, Clinton was asked by Saban what she would do on her first day in office and she said dutifully: on the first day I would extend an invitation to the Israeli prime minister to come to the United States hopefully within the first month, certainly as soon as it could be arranged to do exactly what I briefly outlined. To work toward very much strengthening and intensifying our relationship on military matters, on terrorism and on everything else that we can do more to cooperate on that will send a strong message to our own peoples as well as the rest of the world. So that is on my list for the first day. Here are more incredible pander quotes.

The boycott movement against Israel is making our alliance with Israel “more indispensable than ever”. Here is where she suggests that BDS is hurting US efforts to fight terrorism: In this period of period of peril, Israel needs a strong America by its side, and America needs a strong and secure Israel by our side. It’s in our national interest to have an Israel that remains a bastion of stability and a core ally in a region in chaos. An Israel strong enough to deter its enemies, and strong enough to take steps in the pursuit of peace. We need a brave democracy whose perseverance and pluralism are a rebuke to every extremist and tyrant. We need a light unto the nations as darkness threatens. Today three trends in the region and the world are converging and making our alliance with Israel more indispensable than ever. The first is a rising tide of extremism across a wide arc of instability, from North Africa to South Asia. The second is Iran’s continued aggression. The third is the growing effort to delegitimize Israel on the world stage. America and Israel need to address these threats together. We must take an already strong relationship to the next level. We have to develop a common, strategic vision and pursue a coordinated approach, deepen our cooperation and consultation across the board.

     As we’ve stated, FL Senator Marco Rubio is the neoconservative horse in the Republican race. His original backer Norman Braman says that the US must remain strong militarily so it can support Israel– and Rubio visited Israel for the first time in 2010 with Braman, days after he was elected to the Senate. There’s further evidence that Rubio is bought by pro-Israel forces, and that our press is unwilling to talk openly about the Israel lobby. The New York Times reports that Paul Singer, an “influential billionaire” has thrown his support to Marco Rubio. The piece never uses the word “neoconservative” and only mentions Israel three times in passing, and states that Singer has no litmus tests. But he clearly has a litmus test on ferocious support for Israel. Eli Clifton has documented Singer’s extensive contributions to rightwing pro-Israel groups: It has not only been AIPAC, Rubio, and the American Enterprise Institute… that have enjoyed Singer’s largesse… The Israel Project (TIP), now headed up by AIPAC’s former chief spokesperson Josh Block, has received increasingly large contributions from the billionaire. Singer gave $500,000 to the group in 2007 and $1 million in the 2012 tax year (the year Block took over the group’s leadership and the last year for which there are publicly available tax filings). That makes Singer one of TIP’s two largest donors since Block arrived.

Jeb Bush lost the Paul Singer primary in part because of his relationship to Jim Baker, who criticized Israeli settlement growth as an impediment to peace in a speech to J Street.

The Times also fails to state that Rubio has promised to reverse the Iran deal on his first day as president.

Last Sunday, the largest joint military exercise between the United States and Israel began with little fanfare. The war game, dubbed “Operation Juniper Cobra,” has been a regular occurrence for years, though it has consistently grown in size and scope. Now, however, this year’s 12-day exercise brings a portent of conflict unlike those of its predecessors.

Israel has also been preparing for a conflict on the embattled Gaza strip, which – owing to the effects of Israel’s illegal blockade and the devastation wrought by past wars – is set to be entirely uninhabitable by 2020. Reports have quoted officials of the Palestinian resistance group Hamas, which governs the Gaza strip, as saying that they place the chances of a new war with Israel in 2018 “at 95 percent” and that war games, like Operation Juniper Cobra, were likely to be used to plan or even initiate such a conflict. This concern was echoed by IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot, who stated that another Israeli invasion of Gaza, home to 1.8 million people, was “likely” to occur this year. Eizenkot ironically framed the imminent invasion as a way to “prevent a humanitarian collapse” in Gaza.

However, this year’s “Juniper Cobra” is unique for several reasons. The Post reported on Thursday that the drill, set to end on March 15, was not only the largest joint U.S.-Israeli air defense exercise to ever happen but it was also simulating a battle “on three fronts.” In other words, Israel and the U.S. are jointly simulating a war with Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine – namely, the Gaza strip – simultaneously. What makes this last part so concerning are Israel’s recent statements and other preparations for war with all three nations, making “Juniper Cobra” anything but a “routine” drill. It is instead yet another preparation for a massive regional conflict, suggesting that such a conflict could be only a matter of months away.

Never has there been a greater divide between Democrats and Republicans on the subject of Israel in 40 years of polling, according to a survey published on Tuesday.The Pew Research Center findings show Republicans more sympathetic than ever toward Israel, with Democrats increasingly divided, now equally likely to support the Palestinian cause. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remains a particularly divisive force.

Overall, 79% of Republicans sympathize with Israel compared to only 27% of Democrats.Americans who are more favorably inclined to Israel are less likely to believe a two-state solution is possible than those inclined to the Palestinians. And belief in the possibility of peace is correlated with age: the younger you are, the more hopeful you are likely to be for an agreement.“Since 2001, the share of Republicans sympathizing more with Israel than the Palestinians has increased 29 percentage points,” the pollsters found. “Over the same period, the share of Democrats saying this has declined 11 points.”In November, the Jewish Democratic Council of America launched with a mission to reengage Democrats on the politics of Israel and to reclaim a supportive narrative.Israel’s ambassador to the US, Ron Dermer, addressed the group’s launch event, where he characterized bipartisan support for Israel as a strategic asset.“You cannot fly a plane with one wing,” he said.

Today at joint press appearance with Benjamin Netanyahu in Davos, Switzerland, Donald Trump bragged that the U.S. had taken “the toughest issue” — Jerusalem– “off the table” with his embassy announcement. “We don’t have to talk about it anymore.” But if the Palestinians don’t accept his Jerusalem announcement and don’t agree to negotiate peace with the Israelis, the U.S. was “going to have nothing to do with it any longer.” Trump issued that warning in the context of threatening to withdraw hundreds of millions of aid from Palestine unless its leaders negotiate. When they disrespected us a week ago by not allowing our great Vice President to see them — and we give them hundreds of millions of dollars in aid and support… That money is on the table, and that money is not going to them unless they sit down and negotiate peace. Because I can tell you that Israel does want to make peace. And they’re going to have to want to make peace too, or we’re going to have nothing to do with it any longer. The president also said that the U.S. will have a “small version” of the Embassy opened in Jerusalem ahead of schedule in 2019.

MEMORANDUM FOR: The President FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) SUBJECT: Being “Played” By Bogus Evidence on Iran NOTE: The evidence presented by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on April 30 alleging a covert Iranian nuclear weapons program shows blatant signs of fabrication. That evidence is linked to documents presented by the Bush Administration more a decade earlier as proof of a covert Iran nuclear weapons program. Those documents were clearly fabricated as well. We sent President Bush a similar warning about bogus intelligence — much of it fabricated by Israel —six weeks before the U.S./UK attack on Iraq, but Bush paid us no heed. This time, we hope you will take note before things spin even further out of control in the Middle East. In short, Israel’s “new” damaging documents on Iran were fabricated by the Israelis themselves.

Everyone always asks, If there’s not going to be a Palestinian state, what does Israel plan to do with all those Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem under its control? Here’s a visionary answer from an up-and-coming member of the Knesset from Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, Miki Zohar, speaking on Israeli television Sunday.

That’s right, this is Zohar’s vision, on the English language program The Spin Room. The two state solution is dead. What is left is a one state solution with the Arabs here as, not as full citizenship. Because full citizenship can let them to vote to the Knesset. They will get all of the rights like every citizen except voting for the Knesset. Journalist Ami Kaufman: Is that a democracy? Yes it is a democracy because they will get full rights and all the needs to get to prospect and to succeed here in this country. But they won’t be able to vote to the Knesset. But my idea is that we can let them to vote to the Knesset with only three things that they need to do like every other citizen. One, to go the army or to go serve the country, like everyone else here in Israel is obligated to do. Journalist Tami Molad: You want 2.5 million Palestinians serving in the Israeli army? I promise you, they won’t serve in the army, they will let go the option to vote. They won’t vote to the Knesset. They would prefer not voting and not donating to this country, believe me.

It’s astonishing to think that Miki Zohar, a lawyer and religious Jew of 36, thinks he has come up with a brilliant solution, when his answer is just as old as Jim Crow and apartheid and white supremacy. The good thing about his comments is that he is expressing openly what Israel has gotten away with for decades now, governing a people who are not granted the right to vote for their government. And yet our leaders call Israel the only democracy in the Middle East. Zohar’s comments are a lot like settler Yishai Fleisher’s view of Israel’s future, published without rejoinder by the New York Times two weeks ago, in which Fleisher also dispensed with the idea of a Palestinian state– and treated Palestinians as so much human matter to be moved around by Israeli shovels. These guys are helping to create Israel’s new global image.

The announcement today by Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman at the Knesset Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee, that the Trump administration warned Israel that imposing sovereignty over the West Bank would cause an “immediate crisis” between the U.S. and Israel, is spreading like wildfire. Newsweek reported the warning pointed to “a red line for the Trump administration in its relationship with the Israeli government”: “We received a direct message… imposing Israeli sovereignty [on the West Bank] would mean an immediate crisis with the new administration,” Lieberman told the Israeli parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. “The coalition should clearly state that there is no intention to impose [Israeli] sovereignty.” The warning came after Likud KM Miki Zohar, who advocates annexation, stated on Israeli television Channel i24 last night that the two state solution was “dead” and Palestinians, while not having full citizenship, would nonetheless enjoy rights like every citizen, except for the right to vote for the Knesset — unless they serve in the army or to “serve the country” which he hastened to assure viewers they would not do. Lieberman noted he’d been getting calls from “all of the world wanting to know if this is the position of the coalition,” continuing, “[W]e need to separate from the Palestinians and not to integrate them. The decision to annex Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] would mean the integration of 2.7 million Palestinians in Israel.” Rather confusing messaging from the Trump administration. Just last month Trump said he’d be “happy” with a one state solution “if Israel and the Palestinians are happy”. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley later walked that back, saying that the policy was still, two-state solution. Maybe Trump heard Palestinians are not happy. We may be hearing more on this latest development soon as Lieberman is due to meet with top U.S. administration officials this week in Washington.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Thursday to voice US-Israeli concerns over Iran’s attempts to expand its influence in Syria, Israeli sources reported. Netanyahu’s spokesman said that during the latest phone conversation with US President Donald Trump, the Israeli prime minister coordinated stances towards Iran on the eve of his visit to Russia. A ministerial official with a military background said that Iran’s testing of ballistic missiles was a provocation to both the US and Israel, adding that Tehran’s “vital interests” in Syria could soon be targeted. When asked whether Israel would bomb Iranian forces in Syria, the official said: “Anything Iranian that moves in Syria will be a target”. Threats to target Iranian forces in Syria coincided with heavy raids by the Syrian regime on eastern Ghouta, breaking a fragile truce announced earlier by Russia in the area located near Damascus.