Israelis and those around the world who care about what happens in Israel are twisting themselves into knots trying to figure out whether it is going to be Ariel Sharon or Benjamin Netanyahu who runs against Ehud Barak in the election for prime minister. But there's a fourth Israeli politician who may emerge as a candidate for the post, and therein lies a tale with implications for Israel's future and the spread of freedom and democracy world-wide.

The "fourth candidate" is Natan Sharansky, a hero of the Cold War who, as Anatoly Shcharansky, endured 10 years in Soviet prisons for speaking out against the communist regime at Moscow. Since arriving in Israel in 1987, Mr. Sharansky has founded a political party for Russian immigrants and served as a minister in governments headed by both Mr. Barak and Mr. Netanyahu.

Mr. Sharansky might decide not to run, and if the Israeli Parliament votes to disband rather than staying constituted through the Feb. 6 election, he almost certainly will stay out of the race. This column is not an endorsement. If Mr. Sharansky does plunge into the campaign, however, he has the potential to reshape the political debate in Israel and in Washington in a way that could offer the Middle East a path out of its current dismal pattern of bloody conflict and misery.

Simply by virtue of his life story, Mr. Sharansky embodies the essential truth about the war in which Israel and America are now embroiled in the Middle East, from the bombing of the USS Cole to the daily barrages of stones and bullets Israeli soldiers and civilians face in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. That truth is that the current conflict is a seamless continuation of the Cold War. The states and terrorist gangs arrayed against Israel for the most part spent the Cold War as Soviet clients, but they are continuing their war against Israel as if they never got word that their side lost. Just like America, Israel is a country with a free press and regular democratic elections. And just like the old Soviet Union, Israel's enemies like Syria, the Palestinian Authority, Iraq and even Egypt lack human rights, democracy and the rule of law.

Sadly, just as America did in the 1970s, Israel has experienced an attenuation of its will to fight. But the opportunity is now there for an Israeli leader to do for Israel what Ronald Reagan did for America in the 1980s--inspire the country and the world with his sure sense that in this struggle against evil, victory is possible.

Too often for its own good, the Israeli right has offered voters a pessimistic vision of the nation's future. Settle in for another 100 years of armed conflict, the Likud Party of Messrs. Sharon and Netanyahu seems sometimes to be telling Israeli voters, But vote for us because we will build the strongest fortifications and be the toughest warriors.

Strength and toughness are important, surely, but no less so is a positive strategic vision. Under Mr. Reagan, it was "rollback," the idea that the Soviet empire could not just be contained but freed.

The idea that freedom and democracy are about to break out in the neighborhood around Israel strikes a lot of people as about as unlikely as the idea that, say, a bunch of labor unionists in Gdansk would be able to topple the government of Poland. But revolutionary developments are already percolating throughout the Middle East just waiting to be noticed by a government in Jerusalem or Washington with the elan to exploit them.

In Iraq, the free, democratic opposition to Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi National Congress, has begun satellite radio and TV transmissions. In Lebanon, the forces of freedom are becoming increasingly vocal about their desire to expel the Syrian troops that have the country under their boot. Even Saudi Arabia wants in to the World Trade Organization, and with that will come tenuously the winds of Western ways.

Mr. Sharansky is the Israeli leader who has been most consistent and explicit in outlining the potential for a policy of linkage between freedom and democracy and Israel's policy in the "peace process" over which President Clinton and likeminded appeasers have obsessed. With respect to a potential Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights, it is Mr. Sharansky who famously proposed to make the depth of the Israeli withdrawal commensurate with the depth of Syrian democratization. With respect to the millions of dollars that Israel has been funneling into Yasser Arafat's private bank accounts, it is Mr. Sharansky who has suggested that creating a corrupt dictator is not a good tactic for peace, and that Israel's interests would be better served by encouraging transparency and rule of law in the Palestinian Authority. And it is Mr. Sharansky who came to Washington in October of 1999 and, in a speech to the International Republican Institute, spoke of his admiration for the human rights activist Andrei Sakharov and for the cold warriors Mr. Reagan and Sen. Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson, whom he credited with defeating the Soviet Union.

Mr. Netanyahu, too, has toyed with the idea of making the spread of freedom and democracy--rollback, if you will--the centerpiece of Israeli policy. "Modern democracies do not initiate aggression. This has been the central lesson of the 20th century. States that respect the human rights of their citizens are not likely to provoke hostile action against their neighbors," then-Prime Minister Netanyahu told a joint session of Congress in July 1996. By September 1998, however, Mr. Netanyahu had discarded that theme. He was treating with the Arab dictators, and he even seemed to have found a new "central lesson"; he told the U.N. General Assembly, "A peace that cannot be defended will not last. This is the central lesson of the 20th century."

And Ariel Sharon enunciated the principle of peace being contingent on democratization in a speech at Oxford University in 1991. He has backed away from it since then, but if Mr. Sharansky doesn't get into the race, or even if he does, there is nothing to prevent Mr. Sharon or Mr. Netanyahu from returning to the democracy theme.

None of this, though, is enough to satisfy some of the rollback advocates in America, who are increasingly voicing frustration with what they see as the failure of Israeli politicians to see the big picture. This frustration is only likely to heighten if, as seems possible, Mr. Sharon or Mr. Netanyahu enters into a deal for a national unity government with Mr. Barak, who is even more inclined to deal with the dictators.

"They think they can still deal with this on an ad hoc basis of varying firmness or less firmness," says David Wurmser, director of the Middle East program at the American Enterprise Institute. "Even the Israeli right doesn't understand."

The director of the Middle East Forum, Daniel Pipes, says the assumptions that underlie Israel's dealings with the PLO have gone mostly unchallenged by mainstream Israeli politicians, leaving the critique to American intellectuals. "There is no Churchillian voice there saying, 'No, this whole thing is wrong,' " Mr. Pipes says. "It's sad to see that we Americans have to articulate this critique."

But there are signs that the critique is starting to be heard. An establishment think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, on Monday took the unusual step of inviting in three critics of Israel's deals with Mr. Arafat--Mr. Pipes, the Reagan administration Pentagon official Douglas Feith, and the columnist Charles Krauthammer--for a discussion. What a strange and wonderful thing it would be if an immigrant from the Soviet Union and ideas from Washington, working through the Israeli government, helped Lebanese and Iraqis and Saudis and Palestinian Arabs win liberty--and with it peace.

By Ira Stoll