This is a column about Israel’s appalling treatment of a Columbia University professor, Katherine Franke, detained for 14 hours at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv and then deported, but before I get to that a few observations about the incandescent situation in Israel-Palestine. President Trump’s gift for unleashing the worst in people has found no more fertile ground than the Holy Land.

I wrote three months ago that it’s time for Mahmoud Abbas to go; it’s still time. The Palestinian leader has now veered into anti-Semitic tropes worthy of a beer hall in late 1930s Berlin. Jews as usurers is not the stuff on which a state of Palestine will be built.

The Trump administration’s foray into the Israeli-Palestinian imbroglio, set to culminate May 14 with the opening of the United States Embassy in Jerusalem but yet to yield a plan, has been a fiasco. America’s embrace of Israel has been so total that the term “occupied territories” tends to be discouraged in official references to the West Bank. Greater Israel is O.K. in the White House.

Abbas is a bitter old man. He has no feel for the struggle of young Palestinians, like those demonstrating along the Gaza border in marches organized by Hamas. More than 40 Palestinians have been killed, shot by Israeli snipers over the past month. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said that the United States is “fully supportive” of Israelis’ “right to defend themselves.” Yes, Israel has that right, but not the right to use lethal force against mainly unarmed Palestinian civilians, who also have rights, including to liberty and opportunity.