Shechem

He knew, he added, “that to give life to Jerusalem, we must station soldiers and armor on the Shechem mountains.”

If “return” applied to Jerusalem—and “Shechem,” the Biblical name for the Arab city of Nablus—then why not to the whole of “Judea and Samaria”? Before 1967, political borders, however provisional, subtended cultural ones: sovereignty derived from international recognition and the consent of the governed.

In the first century, the emperor Vespasian supposedly built a city near Shechem that he called Neapolis.

But to many Jews, Nablus, which has a population of more than 120,000, is the site of the ancient city of Shechem and part of their biblical birthright.

Like, in Genesis, when Simeon and Levi convinced the men of Shechem to circumcise themselves and then came back a few days later and slaughtered all of them while their penises were still healing.