The Family That Never Came Home. Plus...

 Bernard-Henri Lévy wants a European army. The online right is creating a monster. Hero dog dead at 16. And more.

Around 10 a.m. local time, Hamas handed over the bodies of four Israeli hostages who died in captivity.

Oded Lifshitz, 84, was a retired journalist and activist who advocated coexistence with Palestinians. He was kidnapped from the kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7, 2023. So was Shiri Bibas, then 32, and her children Kfir and Ariel, who were nine months and four years old respectively.

You might remember the image of Shiri clutching the two redheaded children—terror in her eyes—as they were abducted. It looked like it was taken in Poland in the early 1940s.

“Kfir became a symbol because he is the answer to every relevant question about this conflict. His case is the war boiled down to its essence,” Commentary magazine’s Seth Mandel writes in our pages.

Read “The Meaning of Kfir Bibas.”

This morning, hundreds of Palestinians gathered in the winter cold to watch Hamas militants put the coffins of these four Israelis on a stage in Khan Younis. Nearby, a poster showed a man standing next to coffins wrapped in Israeli flags. It stated: “The Return of the War=The Return of your Prisoners in Coffins.”

Meanwhile in Israel, television channels weren’t broadcasting the ceremony.

“Perhaps the oddest aspect of the grief in Israel on Thursday is that the fate of Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir has largely been understood since late 2023,” writes Matti Friedman, our Jerusalem correspondent. “Hamas announced early in the war that the three were dead, killed by an Israeli airstrike,” yet the Israelis seemed unable to accept it.

It was as if their deaths “too unbearable to believe—and so simply wouldn’t be believed until we had no other choice.”

Read “The Family That Never Came Home.”

Yarden Bibas, Shiri’s husband and the children’s father, was released alive earlier this month after 484 days in captivity. On that day, Bari sat down with Matti to talk about the war, why returning the hostages is so fundamentally important to the future of Israel, the rise of anti-Jewish hate—and how to be American, Jewish, and Zionist at the same time.

You can listen to their conversation here:

On the first anniversary of October 7, Honestly’s executive producer Candace Mittel Kahn wrote a profoundly moving piece about her “decision to bring a new Jewish child into the world,” which she described as “an act of necessity.” At the time, she was five months pregnant. Last week, she gave birth to a healthy baby girl.

Read: “Bearing Jewish Children After October 7.”

Is It Time for a European Military?

Yesterday on Truth Social, Trump launched into a tirade against Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, seemingly blaming him for the country’s war with Russia, plus calling him a “dictator” and worse—“a modestly successful comedian.” Then: He went after Europe.

“The United States has spent $200 Billion Dollars more than Europe, and Europe’s money is guaranteed, while the United States will get nothing back. Why didn’t Sleepy Joe Biden demand Equalization, in that this War is far more important to Europe than it is to us—We have a big, beautiful Ocean as separation.”

Today in the The Free Press, French public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy says Trump has made it clear that Europe can no longer rely on the United States. It’s time, he writes, for a European army.

Read “Bernard-Henri Lévy: Europe Must Unite or Die.”

Normies Always Win

On Monday, our editor in chief Bari Weiss addressed the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship in London. She implored conservatives to learn from the center-left’s disastrous capitulation to the far left. The far right, she argued, is no less illiberal, and the center-right cannot risk ignoring them. “Time is like luck. You run out of it faster than you think you will.”

I couldn’t agree more. As a former campaign volunteer for Bernie Sanders, I tried to warn the left their politics were getting increasingly freakish—niche, identitarian, and completely out of step with the working class. In the great laboratory of the internet, the Frankenstein-left created a monster. On November 5, 2024, normie villagers grabbed their torches and chased it out of town.

In a new column for The Free Press, I argue that the right’s increasing cultural dominance will inevitably result in something similar. High on their own supply after Trump’s win, and their parasocial pal Elon Musk’s ascent to the highest levels of government, the online right is getting extreme. Its positions will, in due course, horrify normal Americans—including many Trump voters—setting the stage for an inevitable pendulum swing back to the middle, or even beyond.

Read my piece, “The Online Right Is Building a Monster.”

Is the Trump Admin Breaking the Law?

Since his inauguration, Trump has used blunt executive power to implement his agenda. He’s issued one executive order after another and allowed Elon Musk’s DOGE—an advisory board with a novel and somewhat unclear legal status—to exercise seemingly unilateral power over the country’s federal agencies.

Opponents say Trump is unconstitutionally abusing his authority. Is he? Time to ask a guy who actually has the word constitution in his job title. As lawsuits against the administration loom, Free Press deputy editor Charles Lane engages Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, on the big questions: Can Trump really end birthright citizenship? Are we in a constitutional crisis? Is the DOGE stuff even legal?

Find out here: “The Rule of Law After the Vibe Shift.”