This article was originally published by Haaretz and is republished with permission.

Areas of the Old City adjacent to the Hebron settlements have been almost entirely emptied of their Palestinian residents. (Michael Phillips, IMEU)

When the prime minister says he was "ashamed," referring to the behavior of Hebron settler Yifat Alkobi, whose profanity unleashed at the Abu Ayshe family sent them reeling into their home over the Hebron market, we should tell him that a prime minister was not elected to be ashamed, but to take action. When the government under his leadership decides to set up a ministerial committee to deliberate the issue of enforcing the law against Hebron settlers because "it is impossible to accept such brutal behavior," the shame belongs to all of us.

After all, there is no need for a committee to learn the facts and take action. To date no prime minister has proved brave enough to accept the challenge and remove this festering wound of settlement activity, this outcast Jewish settlement, which has managed to drive 30,000 Palestinians from their homes and their shops, and transform the Palestinian center of Hebron into a ghost town. The profanities of Alkobi are peripheral to this entanglement.

The Jewish settlement in Hebron was the first organized illegal outpost, which was set up following the Six-Day War by Rabbi Moshe Levinger on seder eve, 1968 at the city's Park Hotel. Several dozen guests who had come to celebrate the seder in the city refused to return to their homes.

They included the historic founders of the settlement movement, who identified this means of illegal activity under cover of the law: takeover by devious methods, lobbying and force, exploiting Israel Defense Forces soldiers and politicians to gain protection, while rolling their eyes, as if all this constituted moral Zionism, to which any opposition implied treason to one's people and motherland. Alkobi is only a natural outgrowth of the Levinger family.

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If a peace agreement is ever signed with the Palestinians, the Hebron settlers will have to end their illegal holiday at the Park Hotel, which has been going on 38 years too long, because no border will be able to include this outrageous enclave inside a large Arab city. Following the 1994 massacre by Baruch Goldstein of Muslims praying in the Tomb of the Patriarchs, Yitzhak Rabin should have seized the opportunity to remove the Jewish settlement, but he was deterred. And since then, no leader has even dared think about doing so.

The IDF has law enforcement authority over the Hebron residents, Jewish and Arab alike, and so does the Israel Police, but no one is willing to confront them, knowing the government is not really interested in such enforcement. The soldiers lack the backing and the incentive to enforce the law in a place that has been lawless for years.

There is no point in again going over the matter of law enforcement when the presence of the Jewish settlement in Hebron, in a time of conflict - as opposed to the conditions of peace - is blatantly illogical.

The bully settlement in Hebron is an example of the national stupidity that overtook Israel when it decided to settle forcefully in every place of religious significance, regardless of political realities. This is another obstacle that must be removed, and if Ehud Olmert would succeed in carrying out only this one essential deed, it would be possible to describe his tenure in office as having had positive results.