Today's meeting in Washington between President Bush and the Israeli prime minister, Mr Sharon, has been carefully choreographed to suit the political purposes of both men, as well as to affect the changing fortunes of peace in the Middle East.
Mr Sharon hopes to receive support for his plan to withdraw Israeli troops and settlements from Gaza - and to extract a political price from the United States for it. Mr Bush insists any such understanding can be harnessed to the internationally agreed road map for an Israeli-Palestinian peace, not Mr Sharon's ambition to perpetuate the West Bank occupation. It is a risky strategy both ways, but the balance of advantage is decidedly in Mr Sharon's favour.
Mr Sharon announced his Gaza plan in February, having said earlier he would take unilateral actions to protect Israeli security if he could not find an acceptable negotiating partner on the Palestinian side, a decision also taken unilaterally. Gaza has about 7,500 Israeli settlers living in the midst of 1.3 million Palestinians, most of them refugees from the Israeli war of independence in 1948. Militarily, it is difficult and costly to defend. For Mr Sharon it makes sense to withdraw from Gaza the better to consolidate Israel's hold on the West Bank.
On Monday night , he told a group at the largest West Bank settlement, which has three times the number of settlers in Gaza, that Israel would keep the West Bank for "all eternity". There are some 230,000 Israeli settlers there, living among 2.3 million Palestinians.
Mr Sharon mentioned by name six of the largest settlements. He hopes to convince Mr Bush they should be permanently part of Israel under any peace settlement, taking in up to 15 per cent of the pre-1967 West Bank territory which is meant to be handed back to the Palestinians. He wants US assurances there will be no Palestinian right of return to Israel and that withdrawing from any territory would not affect Israel's right to respond militarily against any terrorist attacks from there.
These conditions are sought to help convince his Likud party membership to vote for the Gaza plan in a referendum early next month. Some of them continue to believe it is wrong on principle to withdraw, others that a price must be extracted. Hence the assassination of the Islamic leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin last month and these audacious demands on a sympathetic US administration.
It is hard to see how Mr Bush can credibly harness such concessions to the road map agreed with the European Union, Russia and the United Nations. Such a lop-sided agreement would reinforce the image of a US-Israeli alliance in the Middle East rather than the powerful and balanced mediating role Mr Bush wants to project as the military and political difficulties he faces in Iraq mount up.