Had Mr. Begin's career come to an end in 1977, when he was struck by a serious heart attack, he would have been remembered for his feats against the British Army and for 30 years of dogged and shrill parliamentary opposition. A veritable political Lazarus, Mr. Begin survived both heart failure and political oblivion to be carried to power in 1977 by Israel's dispossessed Jews from Arab lands that were totally alien to his Polish roots, and by disenchanted voters who wanted deep changes in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur war.

Mr. Begin's rule, not unlike that of Richard Nixon, was marked by passionate hostility and bitter resentment among his country's traditional elites. Mr. Perlmutter traces the roots of the antagonism that had relegated Mr. Begin to pariah status for the first two decades of Israel's existence. It had its origin in Jewish politics in Poland, which were polarized between the majority Socialist Bund and the authoritarian right of Zeev Jabotinsky and his uniformed youths, Betar. The latter was the organization that Begin joined as a student. He rose slowly in the ranks as a party functionary. He became a devoted follower of Jabotinsky, described by Mr. Perlmutter as ''the shining ideological and political light'' in his life. Mr. Perlmutter's chapters on Betar and Mr. Begin's youth are among the more valuable in the book. Betar was committed to the leadership principle and to military activism. It was intended as the ''disciplined and uniformed'' nucleus of a Jewish Legion. It found inspiration in Marshal Pilsudski, the hero of the war against Russia in 1916, and in his Polish Legions. ''So strong was the Zionists' admiration that when Pilsudski died in 1935, hordes of Betarim showed up in full uniform to honor the old marshal.'' Betar was widely regarded as a fascist organization by liberals and leftists alike. Yet in 1935, in Polish Cracow, not far from Nazi Germany to the west and Soviet Russia to the east, Jabotinsky directed that the Jewish state to come must be a free parliamentary democracy, ''for which we can emulate the British and their system.''

The Germans invaded Poland in 1939, and the following year Mr. Begin fled to Lithuania, then already under Soviet rule, and ended up in the Gulag. In ''White Nights'' he wrote the story of his ordeal, anticipating Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's ''Gulag Archipelago.'' He remained committed to the democratic ideal, even though, as Isaiah Berlin observed, the most persistent propaganda in those days declared that democratic forces were played out and the choice then lay between the two bleak extremes, Communism and fascism.

Mr. Begin finally came to Palestine in 1942, a soldier in the Polish Army of Gen. Wladyslaw Anders. He was 30 years old when he arrived and, as Mr. Perlmutter comments, ''he was a stranger in a strange adopted land.'' This condition was never to change, even though he eventually headed Israel's government for seven years. He was a true product of the Diaspora, a late arrival to the country and a city dweller. Unlike most of Israel's founders and leaders, past and present, Mr. Begin had spent half of his life in the Galut (Diaspora). ''He never captured the imagination of the sabras, the young Israelis who worked the land, joined its political parties, worked in the kibbutzim and fought its wars. To them Begin was someone to be mocked, a social throwback, an old world courtly Jew wearing ill-fitting clothes, speaking with a strong accent.'' These indelicate comments echo widely held views in Israel about Jews from the Galut. Begin was charged with having ''de-Israelized'' Israel. He was blamed for creating the climate in which another rightist Diaspora Jew, the American Rabbi Meir Kahane, managed to get elected to the Knesset.

Contradictions lie at the heart of most good biographies, and Mr. Perlmutter makes full use of the ones here. Mr. Begin is an ideal subject, for his life is a tale of irreconcilable aspirations and strange contrasts. From most wanted terrorist during Britain's mandatory rule he evolved into an expert parliamentarian and a fervent defender of the rule of law. He sought power for 30 long years, yet after seven years in office he suddenly withdrew from public life in 1983, his task unfinished, and he now lives in virtual self-entombment. He was the most hawkish leader Israel had seen, yet he sacrificed territory for peace with Egypt. He believed in pomp and ceremony, yet he lived in humble circumstances. He was thought of as a right-winger, yet in economic matters and on welfare programs for the poor his policies were a far cry from those of the doctrinaire right.