As legend has it, the 16th-century Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent issued a royal edict (or firman) allowing Jews to pray at the Western Wall. But a record of this firman has never been located. To further complicate matters, in the early 20th century Itamar Ben-Avi—whose father, Eliezer Ben-Yehudah, was responsible for the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language—wrote extensively of a later, similar firman, issued by Sultan Abdulaziz, who ruled from 1861 to 1876. This too has never surfaced in the Ottoman archives. Nadav Shragai describes the quest for these mysterious documents, and cites the best evidence available:

[T]he British-appointed International Commission of Inquiry for the Wailing Wall (1930) brought relative order out of the chaos. The committee was established after the dispute over the Western Wall and the riots of 1929 that erupted in its wake. The commission generated tens of thousands of pages of documents and protocols that are now stored in the Central Zionist Archives. . . . The three members of the committee . . . mention no fewer than five firmans that the [two] sides claimed to have existed. They do not include the earliest one from Suleiman the Magnificent, but they look into the existence and substance of others.

The firmans mentioned by the commission date from 1840, 1880, 1889, 1893, and 1911. According to the commission’s findings, none of them explicitly mentions the Western Wall, but they do state that . . . there would be no interference with the visits of Jews to pray [at] places overseen by the Chief Rabbinate. It was obvious to the commission that this included the Western Wall. The commission said it had translations of the firmans from 1840, 1889, and 1911. The authenticity of the 1840 firman, the committee writes, “cannot be doubted.” . . .

The commission even stated that the Muslim Waqf [the religious authority that still administers the Temple Mount] saw these decrees as an expression of a positive policy toward the Jews and their freedom of religion, and there was no reason to believe that the Jews who prayed at the Western Wall were cases of exceptional tolerance. Official statements of that policy, the commission said, were at least as important as the firman of 1889, [as the Waqf’s decision was officially] registered with the Shariah court.

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.