The pessimists warned that it would usher in the End of Days. The optimists anticipated the dawn of a new era of peace. And even though the beginning of the new millennium did not coincide with the apocalyptic battle that the doom-mongers had been predicting, 2000 has marked a horrifying descent into conflict, sparked by controversy at the very spot earmarked by extreme fundamentalists and messianist zealots as the inevitable venue for the confrontation that would preface a final war of the worlds: the Temple Mount in the heart of Jerusalem's Old City.
Twelve months ago, the agenda that Israel's Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, had set himself seemed extraordinarily ambitious but far from absurd. This was the year in which, having won an overwhelming electoral victory with a platform devoted to peacemaking, he would use that public support to secure permanent peace accords with Syria, with Lebanon and with Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority, winning Israel its "circle of peace" - normalised relations with all its neighbours.
Twelve months ago, Mr Arafat was promising his people independent statehood for Palestine by the autumn, and the ailing Syrian President, Hafez Assad, though never one to show his cards publicly, was widely believed to be determined to push for an agreement with Israel, to leave his designated but inexperienced heir, son Bashar, the opportunity to deliver prosperity to a country that had hitherto spent so much of its limited resources on the military.
In President Clinton, the leader of the free world with the clout and the years of personal experience of brokering Middle East progress, they all had the perfect middleman with the perfect incentive: the desire to seal his two terms with the peacemaker's legacy, to have the Lewinsky scandal elbowed out of the history books by the achievement of reconciliation between Israelis and Arabs. The Syrian peace train was the first to be derailed, doomed by a combination of apparent US diplomatic ineptitude and exaggerated last-minute brinkmanship by the two key protagonists, Messrs Barak and Assad. President Clinton thought that he was travelling to meet President Assad, in Geneva in late March, to finalise the terms of the Israeli-Syrian peace accord. It was not to be.
Closer to death than the international observers had realised, Mr Assad proved unwilling to settle for the land of the Golan Heights, insisting on a stake in the water as well - specifically the sweet water of the Sea of Galilee where, he rhapsodised to Mr Clinton, he had paddled as a child. But Mr Barak was not about to relinquish the Israeli monopoly on his country's most important natural reservoir.
The moment passed and Mr Assad died shortly afterwards. His son Bashar - young, hesitant, and sworn in as president on the strength of Assad senior's iron will rather than any tangible popular support - is in no position to make peace on terms more generous to Israel than those offered by his father.
For Mr Barak, the death of the sphynx of Damascus represented the beginning of the end of the peace vision. Deprived of a negotiating partner in Syria, he could no longer hope to achieve an accord with its client state, Lebanon, either.
But he had promised his people that, before summer, come what may, Israel's demoralised soldiers would have evacuated the so-called "security zone" - the buffer region occupied by Israel for the best part of a generation, protecting northern Israel from attack. And, in May, evacuate he did, under Hizbullah fire, with no agreement with either Damascus or Beirut.
Critics at home accused him of embarking on a dangerous gamble. And, for now, it's not clear who is right. Mr Barak argued that Hizbullah and other militia forces would stop their attacks - in which an average of two dozen Israeli soldiers a year had been killed in south Lebanon - the moment that Israel withdrew to the international border. The Israeli sceptics warned that the attacks would continue inside sovereign Israeli territory and that, sooner or later, Israel would be forced to reinvade Lebanon - only this time without the support of its proxy militia, the South Lebanon Army, which collapsed amid its members' cries of abandonment and betrayal in the chaos of the withdrawal.
Relatively speaking, the new, UN-recognised international border has been tranquil. Hizbullah disputes one area of the frontier, claiming that Israel is still holding Lebanese territory, and it has killed and captured several Israeli soldiers there. But the most significant impact of the Israeli pullout has not been felt on the Lebanon border at all but, rather, in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Here, a new generation of Palestinian militants watched the Israeli army abandon every last inch of occupied territory, its military might rendered ineffectual by relentless guerrilla warfare. And they wondered why their own leader, Mr Arafat, had abandoned similar tactics in favour of a negotiating process that was moving at snail's pace and seemed unlikely, in any conceivable scenario, to give them the 100 per cent of the territory that they were seeking.
The Syrian option lost and the Lebanese commitment honoured but at considerable risk, Mr Barak now turned his attention to the Palestinians, and to the mid-September deadline that he had agreed with Mr Arafat for a full peace treaty and Palestinian statehood.
Again, however, the combination of apparent US diplomatic ineptitude and the stubbornness of the protagonists was to be prove fatal. It may be that Mr Barak - the ex-general recognised even by his supporters as singularly reluctant to consult, advise and delegate - neglected to inform Mr Clinton in advance precisely what terms he would be willing to offer to Mr Arafat when they locked themselves away for two weeks of negotiation at the Camp David retreat in July.
If he did give the Americans an outline of the concessions, it is hard to understand why the State Department did not immediately begin pulling its many diplomatic strings around the Middle East to alert potentially moderate leaders to the unprecedented nature of the Israeli offer and thus to provide Mr Arafat with the support and encouragement of his Arab peers to strike a deal. But even if Mr Barak kept the Americans in the dark until the Camp David talks had begun, there was still, surely, an opportunity for some emergency State Department diplomacy. It was an opportunity that went begging.
None of the participants has yet provided chapter and verse on the specifics of the Camp David negotiations. But it seems clear that Mr Barak offered a full Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip (where Mr Arafat currently controls about two-thirds of the territory) and a pullout from almost all of the West Bank (where Mr Arafat today has full or partial control of some 40 per cent). He sought to extend Israeli sovereignty into three or four "settlement blocs" on a small proportion of the West Bank land. He also offered, under vague terms, some kind of partnership in Jerusalem - a sharing of the capital.
These terms went far beyond the presumed Israeli consensus but they failed to produce an accord. The two sides were apparently stymied by their disputes over the rights and fate of Palestinian refugees and by their rival claims to the Temple Mount, the Haram al-Sharif.
So the talks broke up in bitter deadlock, albeit with a joint commitment to keep trying. And two months later, amid the tension and frustration that had stemmed from their failure, Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon, perhaps the most loathed Israeli politician in the Arab world, made a high-profile tour of the Temple Mount. Palestinian worshippers protested violently the following day, Israeli police opened fire and the second Palestinian Intifada uprising erupted.
For the Middle East, the contrast between the beginning and the end of 2000 could hardly be more acute. Twelve months that began on the apparent brink of peace are ending on the apparent precipice of regional war. Far from signing new accords, Israel's existing peace treaties with Jordan and Egypt are under unprecedented strain, and the other fragile diplomatic ties, with the likes of Morocco, Tunisia and some of the Gulf principalities, are in deep freeze.
Mr Arafat professes continued commitment to a negotiated solution but the gunmen of the Tanzim militias, ostensibly loyal to him, consistently vow to escalate the Intifada. Mr Barak, desperate for a diplomatic breakthrough, stands accused by human rights organisations of authorising an excessive use of force in the confrontations. And the death toll rises by the day.
Mr Barak is heading for defeat in elections forced upon him by a re-energised Israeli right wing. The right's most effective spokesman, Benjamin Netanyahu, is set to return as prime minister just two years after his hardline policies were rejected. The majority sense in Israel is that he was right and Mr Barak was wrong, that the Palestinian leadership was never seriously interested in reconciliation.
Mr Arafat is newly popular at home and winning sympathy abroad, if only because of the sheer scale of Palestinian losses. But any declaration of statehood he may make will be hollow without Israeli support and even some of his advisers muse privately about whether Camp David marked the latest and gravest in a series of missed peacemaking opportunities.
Mr Clinton leaves office in just a few days, his dream of Middle East peace in tatters. If anything, one fears that he may be remembered as the president who charmed and chivvied, and came so close to fostering reconciliation but, ultimately, departed the scene with Israeli-Arab enmity at new heights, on the eve of full-scale regional conflict.