Picking a Fight for Israel : A PLACE AMONG THE NATIONS: Israel and the World, <i> By Benjamin Netanyahu</i> ; <i> (Bantam: $24.95; 496 pp.</i> )

One night in mid-January, Benjamin Netanyahu made an unexpected appearance on prime-time Israeli news. Netanyahu, the glib former Israeli ambassador to the U.N., was running for the leadership of the Likud, the country’s largest right-wing party. On the air, he admitted he had cheated on his wife, and alleged that political rivals had tried to blackmail him to quit the race by threatening to publicize intimate photos.

In the days that followed, Netanyahu’s comments in the media were shrill. His opponents, he said, were trying to “murder” him. The alleged plot was “a hand grenade” thrown into his family life, as well as “a political crime unprecedented in the country’s history--maybe in the history of democracy.” But, he said, he had decided to fight back.

Neither his admissions nor his allegations seemed to hurt him. Two months later he won the party primary, becoming the country’s top opposition figure. Still, Netanyahu’s statements revealed more than his peccadilloes. There were the repeated metaphors of violence and power. There was the identification of himself with the country, democracy and all else holy. And there was hype, loads of hype, in the style of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the ideologue of militant right-wing Zionism who died in 1940.

Netanyahu says in his preface that his purpose in writing this work--an argument for his hard-line views on the Arab-Israeli conflict--was to win “the battle for truth” against Arab propaganda. Indeed, his sense of being embattled is implied in this book’s title, for Netanyahu seeks to secure lonely Israel’s right to “a place among the nations.”

The curious thing, though, is that Israel has such a place. It has diplomatic relations with over 100 countries. It has received billions of dollars in aid from the world’s sole superpower, the United States. It is hardly a pariah.

True, Israel is technically at war with most of its Arab neighbors. It also faces criticism, even from allies, of its policies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and pressure to give up those territories for peace.

Netanyahu, though, does not so much respond to these policy disputes as rage against what he sees as merely the latest chapter in the Western powers’ “spectacular betrayal” of Zionism. The betrayal began, he explains at length, when Britain failed to keep the promise it made at a post-World War I peace conference to create a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan River. He treats this territory--now known as the Occupied West Bank--as an integral part of the Jewish state, and appears to regard any challenge to Israel’s control of it as a challenge to the country’s existence. That some Israelis support a pullback, says Netanyahu in his final chapter, is only a sign that the Jews still lack experience in power politics.

Netanyahu’s emphasis on power, however, may have more to do with his own upbringing than with contemporary Mideast conflicts. Netanyahu’s father was a close associate of Jabotinsky in the 1930s, and the son apparently learned political doctrine on his father’s knees. A Russian-born, Italian-educated writer, Jabotinsky believed power was a good in itself. He also regarded nations as organic units. To give someone a sense of Jewish nationhood, he once wrote, “take a few hundred Jewish youngsters, dress them in uniform, and let them parade before his eyes--in a well-ordered march, where every step of those 200 lads will sound like thunder, like a machine.”

From Jabotinsky, Netanyahu takes a view that power is the sole axis of Jewish history. From Jabotinsky, too, he takes a disregard for Arab nationalism, and anger at Western treachery: Jabotinsky, intensely pro-Western, clearly felt betrayed when British policy tilted toward the Arabs. But Jabotinsky wrote at a time when Jews were stateless and desperately weak. Repeated today, the same ideas have an anachronistic ring.

Netanyahu builds his case on history, often rudely bent to fit his polemic. We read, for instance, that the Jews remained a vital community in the Holy Land until the Arabs invaded in 636 and succeeded in “uprooting . . . the Jewish farmer from his soil.” Thus, he says, “it was not the Jews who usurped the land from the Arabs, but the Arabs who usurped the land from the Jews.” That version ignores the fact that Jews continued to live in the country under Muslim rule. It also allows Netanyahu to paint the Jews’ return to their homeland as akin to the Christian reconquest of Spain from the Muslims--implying a neat and utterly counterfeit past in which Jews have always been aligned with the West against Islam.

But something deeper is revealed here: For Netanyahu, nations are the actors in history; people seem to be mere cells in the national body. So what the Arabs supposedly did in the 7th Century becomes a justification for rejecting Palestinian claims today.

Not the only justification, of course. Netanyahu also presents an extended security argument. The mountain ridge of the West Bank, he says, is the defensive “wall” on which Israel’s defense depends. Give the West Bank to a Palestinian state, go back to the pre-1967 borders, and Israel would be only 9 miles wide at one point--a quick jaunt for invading Arab armies.

This is a nightmarish vision. But if withdrawing is dangerous, staying put might be worse. Though Netanyahu sidesteps the issue, holding on to the West Bank and Gaza Strip means ruling over 1.7 million angry Palestinians. The angriest and most desperate are increasingly willing to attack Israelis with guns or kitchen knives. Last March, 15 people were murdered in such attacks.

Netanyahu does offer a “solution”: a peace treaty that would include autonomy under Israeli rule for the Gaza Strip, and the creation of four “Arab counties” in one-fifth of the West Bank. Israel, he says, “could consider offering citizenship to the Arab population . . . at the end of a cooling-off period of 20 years.”

This is where Netanyahu’s realpolitik turns into political fantasy. Palestinian opposition to Israeli rule will apparently just fade away. Though Netanyahu constantly stresses that Israel is the Middle East’s only democracy, he proposes that West Bank Palestinians be prohibited from voting for at least two decades. The quickly growing Palestinian population won’t pose a demographic threat to Israel’s Jewish majority, because millions of Jews could immigrate, from Russia, Argentina, France--and the United States.

It’s not clear whether Netanyahu believes this could work, or simply thinks that Western public opinion can be convinced it is a reasonable plan. For like Jabotinsky, he does not seem to see any point in speaking to Arabs; the Jews should save their voices for PR in the West.

And so on one level, this book is good PR. It reads easily; the ideas are simple; it is full of personal anecdotes that make it lively, and remind us of Netanyahu’s own military and diplomatic career. In the real Mideast, though, there are chances for peace as well as risks of war, promises met as well as treachery, and complexities that won’t fit into a sound bite. Netanyahu has missed them.