BOOK REVIEW : A Chronicle of Mideast Extremism, Excess : ZEALOTS FOR ZION: Inside Israel’s West Bank Settlement Movement <i> by Robert I. Friedman</i> ; Random House; $22.50; 288 pages

As the New Year approaches, and the New World Order seems ever more ominous, we might well ask ourselves what will happen if the “peace process” falters, and Israel resolves to stay in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

“Four million Jews will then permanently rule two million hostile Palestinian Arabs,” warns Robert I. Friedman in “Zealots for Zion,” “and Belfast will seem like Disneyland.”

In fact, Friedman’s study of the conflict between Arab and Israeli in “the territories” is a sorry chronicle of extremism and excess on both sides of the struggle. By the time he concludes his parade of horribles, ranging from uprooted olive orchards and sealed houses to the fire-bombing of buses and the random murder of innocent children, we are convinced that Belfast-on-the-Jordan is damned near inevitable.

Friedman, a staff writer for the Village Voice, is also the author of a biography of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, a figure who haunts the pages of Friedman’s new book as the spiritual godfather of the settler movement in Israel. And “Zealots,” very much like the earlier Kahane biography, suffers from Friedman’s rather snide approach to people whom he finds ideologically distasteful.

For example, Friedman finds it necessary to characterize one resident of a Jewish settlement on the West Bank as “a slatternly middle-aged woman”--a formulation that one does not often encounter in political tracts. A few pages later, by contrast, he comes up with the adjective pert to describe an Israeli woman whose politics he finds more endearing. The rhetorical manipulation amounts to a kind of fair warning: Friedman is a partisan, not a dispassionate observer.

Of course, many of the men and women whom we encounter in “Zealots for Zion” are fat targets for ridicule and even contempt. His book is crowded with pistol-wielding rabbis, messianic terrorists, rip-off artists, and even one Israeli couple whose dog is encouraged to attack both Arabs and “leftists.”

“You need a stick to control the Arabs,” says one “pudgy” settler with an Uzi whom Friedman chooses to profile. “They have to live in fear. If you don’t use force, they don’t respect you.”

What becomes clear, however, is that the settlement controversy is more nuanced than Friedman’s title might lead us to believe. And Friedman apparently feels no need to even consider the strategic, economic and geopolitical risks that Israel must confront in considering whether (and how) to withdraw from the West Bank, the Gaza Strip or the Golan Heights.

To be sure, one kind of Jewish settler--the kind Friedman prefers to show us--is a religious zealot who believes that the West Bank of the Jordan River is a bequest from the Almighty to the Jewish people.

“Torah forbids us to surrender even one inch of our liberated land,” says one of the rabbis who serves as the ideologue of the settler movement. “There is no Arab land here--only the inheritance of our God--and the more the world gets used to this thought, the better it will be for them and for all of us.”

Nowhere do the fires of zealotry burn brighter than in Jerusalem, a city that is sacred to three religions. Friedman reminds us that at least one group of Jewish militants is rehearsing the ritual of animal sacrifice in anticipation of the coming of the Messiah, and another group tried to recruit an Israeli air force pilot to steal a fighter and strafe the Dome of the Rock Mosque.

“The mosque’s destruction, they had argued, would (ignite) an apocalyptic war between Israel and the Arabs that would end with the liquidation of Israel’s enemies, the expulsion of the Arabs from Judea and Samaria, and the rebuilding of the Third Temple.”

But quite a different impression is made by the Israeli families who are lured to suburban developments in the West Bank by government-subsidized housing, or the newly arrived Soviet emigres who are looking only for a place to live and work.

By focusing on the extremists in Israeli society, Friedman suggests that any attempt by the current Labor government of Israel to withdraw from the West Bank or Gaza--not to mention the Golan Heights or East Jerusalem--would result in a bloody civil war. And that’s depressing enough.

But Friedman entirely ignores the tough questions of security and survival that must be answered in order to induce an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza, and that is what renders his book so superficial and, ultimately, so sterile.