The twin-arched Golden Gate, entry to the Old City of Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives, remained stubbornly bricked-up, no Messiah miraculously finding his way through . . . and no deranged would-be disciples killing themselves or others in an effort to precipitate his arrival.

At the revered birthplace in Bethlehem, a saviour was hailed - but it was the undeniably mortal Yasser Arafat, choosing the start of this new era to promise his Palestinian people their own imminent rebirth, statehood before 2001.

Two thousand doves of peace took to the sky, fireworks zipped heavenwards, and the hoteliers and souvenir peddlers bemoaned the absence of the anticipated millennial tourists - kept away by US State Department's terrorism warnings, groundless Y2K bug concerns or, perhaps, the fear of being trampled in the rush of millennial tourists.

Jerusalem's hoteliers, by contrast, had actually helped ensure that the tourists would stay away - by capitulating to veiled rabbinical threats. If you dared celebrate the Christian millennium with conspicuous partying, the rabbis had warned, you would be breaching the Jewish sabbath - which calls for a day of rest from Friday dusk to Saturday night.

Defy the sabbath, the threat ran, and the "kashrut" licences issued to assure Orthodox Jewish tourists that they can stay at your establishment would be withdrawn.

Basically, Jerusalem's hotels had the choice between one hugely lucrative night of Christian celebration, or an eternity of moderately lucrative Jewish revenue. Understandably, they opted for the latter.

The holy city did party, but not much. The YMCA threw a bash. One of the hipper clubs, Oman 17, drew a crowd of 5,000. But the majority of Jerusalemites stayed home to watch the clocks roll round across the world and, if their views afforded it, to glimpse the Bethlehem fireworks display from their rooftops.

Tel Aviv put on a bit more of a show, the partying more raucous and lengthy, as befits a place that likes to call itself "the city that never sleeps." Even so, the best millennial image it could offer was an illuminated countdown on an office skyscraper, and even that had to be hurriedly corrected to insert that second "n" in millennium.

On the northern border, there was a brief respite in the daily clashes between Israeli soldiers and the pro-Iranian guerrillas of the Hizbullah movement. On the southern border, at Eilat, the European package-tour crowd partied for all the world as though they were oceans away from the Jewish state; indeed, you can easily spend a week scuba-diving, jeep-touring and dancing in Eilat without ever knowing that you've been in Israel.

Come Saturday, Jerusalem's police force was heaving a huge collective sigh of relief. Four hundred thousand Muslims had gathered on Temple Mount for the final Friday prayers of Ramadan, and had gone quietly home. The interim city police commander - his boss had to suspend himself last week after being caught up in a burgeoning corruption scandal - was no longer cursing his luck.

A handful of eccentrics, convinced of their own divinity and arrested in recent days as much for their protection as for anyone else's, were being given psychological counselling. And in Bethlehem's Manger Square, the electronic clock that had counted down the seconds to midnight was already malfunctioning, getting its hours confused with its minutes, its minutes mixed up with its seconds.

By yesterday, it was back to business as usual - the year 2000, old news. The Israeli work week runs from Sunday to Thursday, millennium or no millennium. Tonight the Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak, flies to Washington, to begin the most sustained effort yet to reach a peace treaty with Syria.

His loyalists are hard at work planning the spin that will ensure strong Israeli support for the deal, his opponents drafting the slogans to damn it as intolerable capitulation.

Talks with the Palestinians are intensifying too. For once, Mr Arafat's annual promises of statehood this year sound eminently reasonable.

So that was the second millennium? In this part of the world, not many people have time to look back.