The millennium may have come one year too early for the Middle East. By this time next year, according to the peacemakers' timetables, Israel and the Palestinians are set to have wrapped up a permanent peace treaty - fixing the international borders between them.
By this time next year, as well, the hope is that Israel and Syria, now that they are back at the negotiating table again, will have settled their differences - likewise Israel and Lebanon. If those treaties are signed, relations between Israel and almost the entire Arab world will start to look far rosier than they do today.
Preparations for the millennium have been immensely complicated by the as-yet unresolved diplomatic disputes between Israel and its neighbours. Take the theoretically simple matter of driving a tour bus from Jerusalem to Bethlehem - two central stops on any pilgrim's itinerary, and just a few minutes away from each other - on a road marked out with illuminated Christmas decorations along its lamp-posts.
But Jerusalem is Israeli territory, and Bethlehem is Palestinian controlled, and arrangements for moving tourists from one to the other are far from smooth. Just two weeks before the turn of the millennium, on a Friday in mid-December, Israeli soldiers on their side of the Bethlehem border crossing were turning back tourists travelling in private cars and sending tour buses on a circuitous route into Bethlehem.
Until five years ago, of course, Bethlehem was still under Israeli control and Israeli troops patrolled the city. Those soldiers have gone now and the atmosphere is calmer, the shops full of Christmas decorations, the streets overflowing with traffic. But disputes about an enlarged border-crossing station are still unresolved.
By this time next year, if peace talks do move forward smoothly, it is not inconceivable that Christmas pilgrims might be offered package tours taking in Israel, the Palestinian areas, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. But this Christmas even the various Church authorities can't agree among themselves about key issues.
The Israeli official charged with overseeing health and safety arrangements for millennium visitors, Michael Dor, has confessed to having nightmares about crowd trouble at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem's Old City - another prime site for pilgrims, but one that simply cannot hold the thousands who are expected to converge upon it.
Dor, and others, have been attempting for months to persuade the five Church authorities, who together administer the site, to consent to the opening of a second exit. But, so far, to no avail. The church, much of its interior made of olive wood, has just the one door. On the Greek Orthodox Easter, in April, as many as 20,000 people may try to squeeze in - carrying torches!
And there's an ominous precedent: in 1834 some 500 worshippers were crushed in a panicked rush to the single exit.
Privately, Israeli officials say they are caught between the hope that predictions of three or four million millennium tourists prove accurate, and that the tourism industry thrives, and the hope that the predictions prove hugely exaggerated, because the holy sites simply couldn't cope with the influx. If, for example, the Pope does come to Nazareth, how will the anticipated vast throng of followers flow smoothly along the single road through the Old City? Even on a nondescript early December Saturday morning, the traffic jams were horrific.
The worst threat to millennial festivity, though, is of course the threat of violence. Israel has been closely monitoring the activities of cults and religious extremists suspected of planning to usher in The End of Days by initiating unholy confrontation. Somewhat heavy-handedly, in some cases, it has turned back some groups at the border, and deported others.
Right now, though, on the Temple Mount itself, a different confrontation is brewing between Palestinians who are constructing a new mosque and the Israeli authorities who are seeking to scale it down. The last time the two sides faced off in the area - in September of 1996, when Israel secretively opened a new exit to an archaeological tunnel alongside Temple Mount - riots exploded in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and 70 Palestinians and 15 Israeli soldiers were killed. The last thing anybody needs now, amid the fervour and passion generated by the millennium, is a repeat performance.