By the 1930s, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Turkey’s first president, was deeply involved in his project of modernizing and Westernizing his country, a project that included reforming the universities. When he found out that Jews were leaving Germany to escape Nazi persecution, he began recruiting German Jewish professors. Their fate is the subject of a new German-language film, Haymatloz, whose title is a play on the Yiddish word meaning “homeless.” Heike Mund writes:

The film highlights a chapter of German-Turkish history that has largely been forgotten, telling the stories of five German emigrants who worked as professors at Turkish academies, universities, ministries, and in public office. In Turkey, they weren’t labeled as Jews, but rather regarded as Germans. They taught generations of Turkish students. . . . Istanbul University [alone] hired 30 Jewish professors in the 1933-34 winter semester.

[In the film], Jewish emigrants’ children reminisce about their childhoods, about growing up in Istanbul or in Ankara, and about what awaited them in postwar Germany, where the Jewish returnees were anything but welcome and where no one spoke about the fate of the German Jews.

Haymatloz is a beautiful film, directed with a great sense of timing and power of images, and with a strong political focus toward the end. The film’s protagonists are concerned about a country where, step by step, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is undoing Atatürk’s achievements and Turkey’s social progress.

On Tuesday, a Hizballah drone attack injured three people in northern Israel. The next day, another attack, targeting an IDF base, injured eighteen people, six of them seriously, in Arab al-Amshe, also in the north. This second attack involved the simultaneous use of drones carrying explosives and guided antitank missiles. In both cases, the defensive systems that performed so successfully last weekend failed to stop the drones and missiles. Ron Ben-Yishai has a straightforward explanation as to why: the Lebanon-backed terrorist group is getting better at evading Israel defenses. He explains the three basis systems used to pilot these unmanned aircraft, and their practical effects:

These systems allow drones to act similarly to fighter jets, using “dead zones”—areas not visible to radar or other optical detection—to approach targets. They fly low initially, then ascend just before crashing and detonating on the target. The terrain of southern Lebanon is particularly conducive to such attacks.

But this requires skills that the terror group has honed over months of fighting against Israel. The latest attacks involved a large drone capable of carrying over 50 kg (110 lbs.) of explosives. The terrorists have likely analyzed Israel’s alert and interception systems, recognizing that shooting down their drones requires early detection to allow sufficient time for launching interceptors.

The IDF tries to detect any incoming drones on its radar, as it had done prior to the war. Despite Hizballah’s learning curve, the IDF’s technological edge offers an advantage. However, the military must recognize that any measure it takes is quickly observed and analyzed, and even the most effective defenses can be incomplete. The terrain near the Lebanon-Israel border continues to pose a challenge, necessitating technological solutions and significant financial investment.