Beginning a three-day shuttle mission to the Middle East, the US Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, indicated yesterday he did not intend to try to force the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, back to the negotiating table with the Palestinians for the time being.
At their meeting at the White House on Tuesday, President Bush and Mr Sharon had appeared to be at odds over how to move forward from the current tentative Israeli-Palestinian ceasefire to more substantive peace negotiations.
Indeed, the Israeli media described the differences - which were also evident in Mr Sharon's attempts at some points to interrupt the US President, and in some of Mr Bush's gestures and body language - in highly dramatic terms, with some analysts speaking of a rare US-Israel "confrontation", and one front-page columnist, in the mass-selling Yediot Ahronot tabloid, claiming that Mr Bush had "ambushed" Mr Sharon by pressing for a speedier resumption of the peace effort than the Prime Minister wished.
Palestinian leaders, too, interpreted the meeting in a similar light, with Mr Ahmed AbdelRahman, a senior adviser to the Palestinian Authority President, Mr Yasser Arafat, praising the "objective and balanced position that President George W. Bush expressed in his meeting with Sharon", a far cry from the more typical Palestinian assertions that US administrations show a pro-Israel bias.
However, in Egypt yesterday Mr Powell made it clear that the US was in fact prepared to allow Mr Sharon to decide the timetable for further progress on the US-backed Mitchell Commission proposals for a return to peacemaking.
"Mr Sharon has been quite clear," said Mr Powell after talks with President Hosni Mubarak. "He is seeking absolute quiet."
While the President, Mr Powell intimated, felt that the next stages of the Mitchell plan could be implemented soon, given that the level of daily Israeli-Palestinian violence had fallen in the past two weeks, "at the end of the day it is the parties that will have to decide . . . and that means Prime Minister Sharon".
For Palestinian leaders, such a stance, if borne out in Mr Powell's meetings today and tomorrow, will constitute a heavy disappointment. The Palestinian negotiator, Mr Hassan Asfour, said he was expecting Mr Powell to use his trip "to lay down a plan to implement the Mitchell report in full and to end Israeli aggression . . . and settlement activity".
In interviews on Israeli television yesterday, Mr Sharon repeated that he would not advance the Mitchell plan - which provides for a six-week "cooling off" period, confidence-building measures including a settlement freeze, and then a renewed effort to reach a permanent peace agreement - until there was "a complete halt in violence: not a 100 per cent effort [by Mr Arafat], but 100 per cent results".
Mr Powell, looking ahead optimistically to the implementation of the Mitchell plan, noted that some people believed a permanent treaty might be possible "within a year", an assessment that rather conflicts with recent diplomatic experience.
At Tuesday's White House meeting, after the cameras had gone, Mr Sharon presented Mr Bush with a map showing his "realistic" terms for an accord with the Palestinians, apparently including substantial swathes of Israeli-held territory in the Jordan Valley, and just across the old 1967 Israeli border inside the West Bank.