Such arguments fall short. By dismantling Palestinian freedoms, by disempowering his people, Abbas has been undoing the foundations of statehood and sapping the energy that comes with personal agency. It is time to organize elections that might usher in younger leadership — and reveal the balance of forces in the West Bank and Gaza. The alternative is a drift to despotism under a bunch of old men long on outrage but short on everything else.

“If you don’t take agency in your liberation, you are not going to be free,” Fayyad told me. “What Palestinians see of their state right now is not very attractive.”

Abbas remains committed to a two-state outcome. But belief in a two-state peace is dwindling. Shikaki, the pollster, told me that Palestinian support for two states is now about 46 percent, down from about 80 percent in the mid-1990s. Still, he said, a two-state solution remains viable. Surveys show that various incentives — like the release of prisoners for Palestinians, or a wider peace with the Arab world for Israelis — can quickly shift opinion.

Sooner or later, whether in the next several months through an indictment or later through the ballot box, Netanyahu will be gone. It’s idle to think any successor will easily cede territory for peace. Yet it’s possible; it’s happened before. Trump, too, will be gone one day. Abbas could live on for several years, but the damage he is doing the Palestinian cause is such that he should quit now if he is not prepared to organize an election in 2018.

In the current vacuum, a dream of one state with equal rights for all peoples — a kind of United States of the Holy Land — has gained some traction. It is pure, if seductive, illusion — flimsy code for the destruction of Israel as the national homeland of the Jews. It will not happen.

Trump’s instinct to blow up the status quo is dangerous. So is Abbas’ comfort with that status quo. It corrodes. The threat from Trump to cut off aid could leave millions of Palestinian refugees without access to schools or hospitals. That’s unacceptable. But it’s equally unacceptable that Arab states only contribute about 3.5 percent of the budget of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinians refugees, compared with the American contribution of about 25 percent. The “peace process,” unable to resolve the refugee issue, has become an infernal, corrupted mechanism incubating victimhood and masking myriad abuses. The Palestinian Authority is its poster child.

“The Palestinian Authority is a subcontractor to the occupation,” Issa Amro, a human-rights activist in Hebron told me. “Abbas should stop corruption and start organizing an election.”