“There is still time for diplomacy to work,” Barak told a forum yesterday at Tel Aviv University. But he said Israel expects the West to establish a “final deadline” for exhausting those efforts. 

“No option should be taken off the table,” he said.

On the leading Israeli news site, YNET, the main headline reads, “Clinton:  U.S. Not Closing the Door to Talks With Iran.”  In a four-line sub-head, it is noted that Clinton’s remarks come “five days after a White House deadline to Iran has passed,” and “two days after Iran issued an ultimatum of its own to the West.” It also notes Clinton’s admission that U.S. efforts to engage Iran on its nuclear program ”have not been encouraging.”

In this morning’s dispatch from Washington in the Jerusalem Post, ”We seek sanctions on Iran gov’t to avoid harming civilians,” Clinton is quoted as saying: “We have avoided using the term deadline, because we want to keep the door to dialogue open. But we’ve also made it clear we can’t continue to wait.”

But reporter Hilary Leila Krieger notes that White House spokesman Robert Gibbs “recently use the term deadline, in the context of the low-enriched uranium deal brokered by the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran was given until December 31 to accept.”

The report cites the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, who told RTL Radio, “We are not the ones who have to decide whether to accept what they want to impose on us. No, this is not the way it is done.”

Iran has threatened to begin enriching its nuclear fuel stockpile on its own at the end of January.