[In the review below, Smith generally praises the themes and tone of Peace and Its Discontents but notes that "the articles are dated."]

An intellectual, says Edward W. Said, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, must be a rebel against prevailing ideas. In Peace and Its Discontents he follows his own precept well: few can match the pungency with which he challenges conventional wisdom on the Middle East peace process—the belief that it is an ineluctably good thing, threatened by self-evidently bad extremists.

Mr. Said mounts his challenge from high moral ground, having long favored a political solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. But the Oslo compromise he finds contemptible. His people, the Arab-American argues fiercely, have been gulled into giving away their trump—Israeli desire for Arab recognition—for little more than a pat on the back from the United States. The interim argument leaves residents of the West Bank and Gaza subservient to Israel, and also subject to the petty dictatorship of Yasir Arafat, a leader he finds beyond redemption.

A fatal weakness of the peace agreement, he argues, is that it squanders the gains and sacrifices of the intifada without getting in return any commitment from Israel on Palestinian self-determination, the status of East Jerusalem or repatriation or compensation for the Palestinian refugees. It splits the Palestinian nation in half, writes Mr. Said (who was displaced from his birthplace in Jerusalem in 1948), offering no future at all to the 55 percent, many of them stateless, who live outside the occupied territories.

Peace and Its Discontents brings together articles written after the September 1993 Rabin-Arafat handshake and is addressed primarily to an Arab audience. Though some of the articles have also been published in American and European magazines, they were originally written for Al Hayat, a leading Saudi-owned Arabic newspaper published in London, or for Al Ahram, a weekly newspaper published in Cairo.

Their sorrow and their anger are good, scolding stuff, an articulate tirade against perceived folly and uncritical applause. But, inevitably, the articles are dated. And since they were written before Yitzhak Rabin's assassination, some are off-key. Mr. Said's argument is based on the premise that the Oslo agreement enabled Israel to attain all its strategic and tactical objectives without its having to cede anything of value in return. Tell that to the Likud opposition, let alone to Rabin's confessed murderer. His assumption, moreover, that the terms of the agreement give Israel no cause for complaint or fear sits oddly with the current state of that country, now torn by religious and political dissension.

Mr. Said writes that Palestine must be restored "to its place not simply as a small piece of territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, but as an idea that for years galvanized the Arab world into thinking about and fighting for social justice, democracy and a different kind of future." This sounds high-minded, but the Palestinians' fight, so far as it existed, got nobody anywhere: the Arab world obtained neither social justice nor democracy, and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza continued to suffer from a repressive occupation. Now, at least, Israel has moved its troops out of most of the main towns in the West Bank and Gaza, and Palestinians have held free elections. What happens next is unknown.

The Oslo agreement is a gamble. The issues that matter most were left to the talks on a permanent solution, due to start in May. The Palestinians have no guarantee of getting what they want, or anything like it. Mr. Said expects the worst and could well turn out to be right: he certainly has reason to mourn the gap now yawning between the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and those in the diaspora. But he tosses aside the inevitable question: what should the Palestinians do instead? Surely, he says impatiently, among six million Palestinians any number of alternatives could be found. Yes, but what were they then and what are they now?