As Israel's Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, heads to the United States this weekend for a first Washington meeting with President George Bush, he can feel fairly confident of a warm White House reception. This despite the fact that the toll of dead and injured in the intifada continues to mount, with five Palestinian children hurt yesterday when an Israeli soldier threw a stun-grenade at their school in Hebron.
The army said the grenade was aimed at stone-throwers and hit the school fence; the Palestinians said there were no stone-throwers, and that the grenade landed in the schoolyard while the children were on a break.
Mr Sharon is to meet Mr Bush on Tuesday, and it is highly significant that he is the first Middle East leader to be invited to visit the president, ahead of forthcoming trips by Jordanian and Egyptian leaders. Mr Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian Authority President, who was a frequent White House visitor in the Clinton era, has so far been unable to secure an invitation.
After 5 1/2 months of the Al-Aksa intifada, Israel and the Palestinians are battling hard, both on the ground and in the media, to show themselves as the victims of this conflict. And while many international delegations to the UN are showing sympathy for the Palestinian call for the urgent dispatch of an international protection force, the Bush administration is not - and indeed seems to be endorsing several of Mr Sharon's central assertions concerning the violence.
The US Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, at a meeting earlier this week with American Jewish leaders, is said to have supported Mr Sharon's insistence that there can be no return to peace negotiations until relative tranquility is restored in the West Bank and Gaza, that Mr Arafat should issue an Arabic-language call to his people to cease violence, and that if and when talks do resume Israel need not be bound by verbal understandings reached in negotiations last year.
Where the Bush administration has been most critical of Israel is in regard to its blockade of the West Bank, still in force in Ramallah, Nablus and Jenin. Mr Sharon continues to promise that such collective punishments will be eased when security considerations permit.