The members of the Middle East old guard are slowly disappearing. King Hussein of Jordan is gone. So, too, King Hassan of Morocco. The Palestinian Authority President, Yasser Arafat, 70, looks ever frailer, the lip-trembling ever-more pronounced. Saudi King Fahd, 78, has already transferred much of his power to Crown Prince Abdallah. Egypt's Hosni Mubarak is no spring chicken at 71.
Syria's President Hafez al-Assad, 69, rumoured for years to be dying of all kinds of ailments, is now more reliably reported to be in unstable health, preoccupied with creating the right circumstances for the succession of his son Bashar.
And so the Middle East enters the new millennium in a spirit of uncertainty, with the health of Mr Arafat and Mr Assad, in particular, crucial to the way events will unfold here in the next year - crucial to the completion of their respective peace negotiations with Israel. For if 1999 saw the dramatic revival of Israel's efforts to normalise its relations with its neighbours, then the year 2000 will see those efforts crowned in success - and the birth of the much-anticipated "new Middle East" - or dashed, by differences at the negotiating table, violence, or the death of key players. Dizzying success or horrifying failure.
There can be no middle-ground.
A year ago, the region was a pressure cooker. Israel's former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Mr Arafat, loathing each other, were barely on speaking terms. Privately, Mr Netanyahu was sending envoys to Mr Assad, offering the world for a resumption of peace talks, but the always cautious sphynx of Damascus was disinclined to believe him. Even Israel's established Arab peace partners were keeping their distance - Egypt's President Mubarak publicly accusing Mr Netanyahu of betraying commitments, Jordan still smarting from the prime minister's abortive 1997 attempt to have Mossad hitmen murder a Hamas Islamic leader in broad daylight on the streets of Amman.
Perhaps because there was no peace process to torpedo, or perhaps because Mr Arafat was making bombing harder for them, the violent extremists of Hamas and its little sister Islamic Jihad were relatively inactive - and thus the cocky, media-savvy Mr Netanyahu was reckoned to have a fair chance of winning re-election when his coalition fell apart in the early spring.
Elected in 1996 on a promise to stop the bombings, he could reasonably claim to have succeeded. What's more, his rival was the stiff ex-general and political novice Ehud Barak, no match for him as an orator, so undervalued even by his political allies that some of them, long forgotten now, set up rival challenges of their own for the prime minister-ship.
But Mr Barak trounced Mr Netanyahu at the polls in May - largely because a sophisticated Israeli electorate ultimately came to regard Mr Netanyahu as unrealistic, a man unwilling to face the fact that the world was preparing to recognise the independent state of Palestine, and thus unable to ensure that the imminent new state be founded in partnership with Israel.
Israel's most decorated soldier, Mr Barak came into office on a tidal wave of self-created expectation - and thus seemed doomed inevitably to fail. He promised to rebuild the partnership with Mr Arafat. He said he would bring Israel's soldiers safely home from the so-called "security zone" in southern Lebanon by July 2000. He vowed to restart formal negotiations with Syria, suspended throughout the Netanyahu years.
The pledges sounded absurd, but he hasn't failed yet. The peace process with the Palestinians has been reactivated - and, despite the absence of much evidence of progress in negotiations, and ongoing disputes over the scale of Israeli settlement building, both Mr Barak and Mr Arafat profess to believe that they can meet their ambitious timetable: the outline of a permanent peace treaty by February; a full accord by September.
The July 2000 deadline for a Lebanon pullback remains operational. The army has been making very public preparations for a withdrawal. And, indeed, it seems that this commitment played a major role in drawing Mr Assad into the peace talks that resumed at the White House on December 15th. Syria had always regarded Lebanon as an asset in the struggle with Israel, allowing Hizbullah guerrillas to target Israeli soldiers there, relentlessly raising the death toll, to keep the pressure on Israel to relinquish the Golan Heights. If Mr Barak were to pull his troops out unilaterally, that pressure point would be gone.
And if Syria were to let Hizbullah continue the war, across the border into northern Israel, it would risk direct confrontation, in which there could be only one winner. Far better, Mr Assad must have reasoned, to come back to the negotiating table, where Mr Barak indicates he is willing to trade the Golan for peace with Syria, Lebanon and much of the rest of the Arab world.
With all the parties now deep in serious negotiation, hopes for the elusive "comprehensive peace in the Middle East" have never been so high. All the pieces of the jigsaw, for once, appear to fit together.
We have an outgoing American President anxious to secure his peacemaker's legacy, happy to bash Israeli and Arab heads together until the deals are done.
We have a strong, pragmatic Israeli leader, elected with overwhelming support, talking honestly to his people about the "painful compromises" they'll need to make for the sake of "a circle of peace," and striving to reach out to his domestic opponents - to prevent the fragmentation of Israeli society that caused the assassination of his mentor, Yitzhak Rabin.
And we have two Arab leaders, who know that their own time is running out and that they dare not bequeath a vacuum; who have the stature to ensure that their own people accept the deals they sign; and who have gauged which of their goals can be realised and which will have to be compromised.
There is, of course, no shortage of hurdles - no shortage of potential enemies on either side. Iran continues to inspire, train and fund militant groups, having concluded that Israeli-Arab reconciliation is not in its interest; the nature of its relationship with the new peace-oriented Syria will be critical. In Israel, an extremist from the far-right sent Mr Rabin to an early grave, and Mr Barak is already intermittently stigmatised as a "traitor," like Mr Rabin, for relinquishing divinely-promised land. Nationalistic fervour runs deep in some of the West Bank settlements that will have to be dismantled in a permanent deal with the Palestinians, even if it is less likely to be violently manifested among residents of the Golan Heights.
Mr Assad and Mr Arafat must both keep a careful eye on potential domestic opposition, but for Mr Barak this will be a daily concern. He has promised his people a referendum on the Golan-for-peace equation, and will need help from Damascus - perhaps even a trip by President Assad to Jerusalem - to convince a majority that the sacrifice is worthwhile. His battered opponents in parliament have latched on to the Golan issue as their one potential source of their rehabilitation. Then there is the perennial potential instability of his own multi-party coalition; superficially, his parliamentary majority seems solid, but this is a country where governments can fall over breaches of the Jewish Sabbath. In Israel, to amend Harold Wilson's clichΘ, a weekend is a long time in politics.
"For the first time in history," President Clinton declared at the White House when the Israel-Syria talks resumed, "there is a chance of a comprehensive peace between Israel and Syria, and indeed all its neighbours." With hard-headed but fair negotiations, a joint stand against militant extremism, and the good health of the protagonists 2000 could indeed mark the start of a new era in the Middle East.
But equally, as he soberly concluded, "the success of the enterprise . . . is not guaranteed. The road to peace is no easier, and in many ways harder, than the road to war."