On December 14th, two weeks after Israel had grudgingly granted the Palestinians permission to operate their own airport, Bill Clinton helicoptered in. Side-by-side with a beaming Yasser Arafat, the American president cut the ribbon to formally open Gaza International. Then the two men made their way to the nised Palestine. Mr Arafat has actually declared statehood several times in the past, always from exile. He has said, on and off in the past few months, that he'll declare it again on May 4th of this coming - the date on which the five-year "interim" negotiating period with Israel, mandated in the Oslo peace accords, expires. He may be dissuaded from making a unilateral declaration then; he may, indeed, be deep in substantive negotiations with a new Israeli government on a mutually-acceptable path to statehood.
But President Clinton's smiling, clapping, hand-shaking presence in Gaza on December 14th illustrated that the days of empty independence declarations are over, that Palestine is surely rising, and that the world's only superpower will be steering the path.
The great irony of the past year, of the past two-and-a-half-years really, is that it was a hardline, right-wing, Palestine-reviling Israeli government that brought Mr Arafat and Mr Clinton so warmly together, and set the seal on US-backed statehood. And in our other end-of-year drama, Mr Netanyahu paid the price for that, paid the price for two-and-a-half years of political zigzagging, and watched his coalition collapse around him.
Mr Netanyahu came to power in 1996 promising his people the magical combination of "peace and security." It can be argued, from his short-sighted, short-term point of view, that he did boost security - the number of Israelis killed in Islamic extremist suicide bombings on his watch is far lower than in the equivalent preceding period, when the moderate Labour Party of first Yitzhak Rabin and then Mr Peres held power in Israel. But the fragile partnership between Israeli and Palestinian security forces dissolved in the gun battles of September 1996, after he secretively opened a new exit to an archaeological tunnel in Jerusalem's ultra-sensitive Old City, never to be restored. And as for bringing peace, well, even Mr Netanyahu's rightly acclaimed presentational skills cannot obscure the fact that he didn't do that. He and Mr Arafat barely met in the course of 1998.
Nor would Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak, or Jordan's ailing King Hussein and temporarily ruling Prince Hassan, still fuming with him for sending a Mossad team to Amman in September 1997 to botch a hit on a Hamas leader, have anything to do with him. There were no multilateral peace talks this past year - the kind at which the Labour governments had gradually warmed ties with regimes like Oman, Qatar, Morocco and Tunisia. There were no regional economic conferences. Israel was condemned repeatedly at the UN in votes where its only defenders were the United States and Micronesia. Mr Netanyahu returned his country, from international favourite in the Rabin 1992-1995 era, to the pariah status of the 1970s and 1980s.
Paralysed at the head of a bickering coalition, Mr Netanyahu needed to choose between pacifying the Jewish settlement champions on his right flank, and his more moderate supporters, the Israeli mainstream, and the international community headed by Mr Clinton. But he opted not to choose. He tried to walk a tightrope. To tell the moderates he was all for peace-making, and the hard-liners that he'd never relinquish another inch. He crowed that his survival defied conventional arithmetic. And then he fell. Two days after Mr Clinton made history in Gaza, Mr Netanyahu's finance minister quit, his defence minister threatened to, the right-wingers said they no longer trusted him, moderates laughed at his attempts to woo them, and he had no option but to gear up for new elections.
1998 was the year in which Mr Netanyahu alienated Mr Clinton and the arithmetic finally proved irresistible. In 1999, Mr Netanyahu will appeal to Israeli voters a second time to put their faith in him as prime minister. It seems improbable to think that they might, but Mr Netanyahu will do his best to defy probability. 1998 was the year in which Mr Arafat found a new friend in Washington. In 1999, he will lean on the United States as he moves assuredly toward statehood. It may come this year, it may take longer. But come it will. December 14th in Gaza - the gathering initiated by Mr Netanyahu - saw to that.