The Middle East/The US: The meeting today between President Bush and the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, is likely to be more fraught than in recent such get-togethers, with the US president so plainly enamoured by the Palestinian Prime Minister, Mr Mahmoud Abbas.
Mr Sharon may try to puncture that admiration by asserting that Mr Abbas is not honouring a commitment to fight terrorism and will cite the discovery yesterday of the body of an Israeli soldier, Oleg Shaichat, whom Israeli police allege was murdered by Palestinians or Israeli Arabs soon after being kidnapped a week ago.
Mr Sharon has been a frequent White House guest under the Bush administration, while Mr Abbas was making his first visit last Thursday. Mr Abbas, who is gradually eclipsing the Palestinian President, Mr Yasser Arafat, on the diplomatic if not the domestic stage, won remarkable plaudits from Mr Bush for his courage and integrity and, most importantly, what the US president described as his readiness to root out terrorism.
Substantively, too, Mr Abbas at least partly persuaded Mr Bush that the security barrier Israel is building along its border with the West Bank - part fence, part concrete wall - and which in places cuts several miles into West Bank territory, is counter-productive and should be halted.
Mr Sharon yesterday won cabinet support for the release of 540 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails, more than 200 of them from Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Israel has also removed some West Bank road blocks, issued thousands more work permits for Palestinians to enter Israel, is releasing tax revenues it owes to the Palestinian Authority and plans to pull the army out of two more West Bank cities shortly.
Mr Sharon may try to finesse the dispute over the security barrier by offering to slow or even halt the pace of its construction so long as there is no resurgence of suicide bombings. If Mr Abbas takes action to thwart the bombers, he may say, Israel will have no need of a costly barrier to achieve the same end.
Aides to Mr Sharon stress however that he remains sceptical about Mr Abbas's readiness to move aggressively to prevent such attacks - and this is the area in which Mr Sharon and Mr Bush may find themselves most at odds.
The US-backed "road map to peace" requires the PA to dismantle terrorist infrastructure.
Mr Abbas told Mr Bush last Friday that the best way to do this - and to prevent Palestinian civil war - was to persuade groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad to abandon violence and pursue their goals solely as political groups.
That process would be accelerated, he said, if ordinary Palestinians felt the benefits of a new tranquillity. That in turn he said, could be fostered if Mr Sharon released more prisoners, halted settlement- and wall-building and withdrew the army from Palestinian population centres.
Mr Sharon, by contrast, argues that Hamas and other extremists are merely using the current intifada ceasefire to re-arm and regroup and accuses Mr Abbas of doing nothing to prevent the next wave of violence.
Mr Bush's sympathies for the Palestinian arguments may also have been bolstered by the fact that while Mr Sharon has removed some illegal settlement outposts in recent weeks, others have sprung up to replace them.
The US president may not be too delighted to learn that a parliamentary committee yesterday allocated a further $1.5 million for the construction of the fence.