Whatever their outcome, the talks with Iran are a well of diplomatic poison for Israel - The Jewish Chronicle

There is a consensus in Jerusalem that the outcome of the next few weeks of talks between the world powers and Iran over a possible nuclear agreement will dictate the direction taken by the Israeli-Palestinian diplomatic process.

A failure to sign any deal will allow the Obama administration, which is the key player within the P5+1 group leading the talks on behalf of the West, to claim it has stood firm on Israel's behalf, giving it leverage to demand Israeli flexibility on other matters.

On the other hand, an agreement may provide more diplomatic time and create momentum for the US and the EU to exert fresh pressure on Israel to move on the Palestinian issue.

The Netanyahu government is expected to object to nearly any form of compromise allowing Iran to retain some uranium enrichment capacity. Such a deal would make Israel much less amenable to pressure to make concessions to the Palestinians. This will inevitably lead to further disagreements with the group of nations that signed the deal.

Meanwhile, with two-and-a-half weeks to the deadline on reaching a comprehensive agreement with Iran, new details are emerging of what such a deal may look like. The New York Times reported that Iranian negotiators have agreed to relinquish a large part of their country's enriched uranium stockpile, shipping it to Russia where it would be converted into fuel rods for the Bushehr nuclear power plant.

While this would decrease the amount of uranium the Iranians can use for building a nuclear weapon, they would still have enrichment facilities for manufacturing more weapons-grade material.

In recent weeks, another detail of the proposed agreement leaked to the press has been the tentative plan to allow the Iranians to continue using 5,000 of its current 20,000 centrifuges, lengthening the amount of time it would take them to enrich enough uranium to weapons-grade level by about a year.

While there has been no official acknowledgment of these details, the US chief negotiator, Wendy Sherman, spoke two weeks ago of achieving "impressive progress on issues that originally seemed intractable."

There has been no official Israeli response to the recent reports on an agreement based on shipping the uranium out to Russia, but it is unlikely that Israel will be comfortable with this arrangement.

Israel's leadership is almost certain to say that it will, at most, delay the Iranians by a few months and still leave them with the capacity to enrich fuel sufficient for a nuclear weapon whenever they decide to do so.

Israeli officials have voiced the concern that the rumoured deals are based on an American decision to allow Iran to effectively become a "nuclear-threshold" state and the Obama administration's eagerness to reach an agreement with Iran at all costs. Another stage of talks between the P5+1 group of nations and Iran will take place next week in Oman, although few are expecting a deal to be signed before the November 24 deadline and it is almost certain that the deadline will have to be extended once more.

However, the fact that US State Secretary John Kerry will be joining this round is a signal that the talks have reached a critical stage. Even if the centrifuges and uranium storage issues are solved, it is still unclear what - if any - agreement has been reached on a list of other issues. These include Iranian plans to complete the building of the heavy-water plutonium reactor at Arak, which could also provide material for a nuclear bomb.