France’s largest publisher, Hachette, announced on Wednesday that it was recalling three high-school textbooks that describe the victims of the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in southern Israel as “Jewish settlers,” AFP reported.
The textbooks read, “In October 2023, following the death of more than 1,200 Jewish settlers in a series of Hamas attacks, Israel decided to tighten its economic blockade and invade a large part of the Gaza Strip, triggering a large-scale humanitarian crisis in the region.”
“Jewish settlers” is a term employed by Hamas to imply that all Jews in Israel are illegally occupying land that belongs to Palestinians.
The textbooks’ historical revisionism is “intolerable,” French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted on Wednesday.
“Revisionism has no place in the Republic. I have asked the government to take measures,” he said in French, adding that relativism has no place with regard to the “terrorist and antisemitic” onslaught on Oct. 7, 2023.
Yonathan Arfi, head of the French Jewish group Crif, said that the manuals for final-year students amounted to “a falsification of history and an unacceptable legitimization of terrorism by Hamas, which this work notably fails to describe as a terrorist organization,” according to AFP.
The French publisher has launched an internal probe and is recalling an estimated 2,000 copies of the manuals, the report continued.
Hachette’s chairman, Arnaud Lagardere, in a statement offered his personal “apologies to all those who may rightly have felt hurt, to the teaching staff, to the parents of students, and to the students themselves,” per AFP.
Thousands of terrorists from Gaza invaded Israel’s northwestern Negev on Oct. 7, 2023, murdering roughly 1,200 people and kidnapping 251 more. The deadliest single-day attack in Israel’s history triggered a two-year war, which has currently been halted by a ceasefire that went into effect on Oct. 10, 2025, and saw the release of all remaining living hostages.
