French textbooks calling October 7 victims ‘Jewish settlers’ recalled after outcry

School textbooks which described the victims of October 7 as “1,200 Jewish settlers” have been recalled by a publisher after an outcry in France. Jewish leaders have condemned the “falsification of history” in the revision books from Hachette. President Emmanuel Macron said the “falsifying of facts” was “intolerable”. “Settlers” when applied to Jews in Israel is widely understood to imply they are illegally occupying the land, and often used regarding those living in the West Bank. The term was applied in the textbooks to all those who died in the massacre in southern Israel carried out by thousands of terrorists in 2023. The relevant passage reads: “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.” It appears in books on history, geography and geopolitics written for final-year secondary school students preparing for the baccalaureat exam. Hachette, France’s largest publisher, announced on Wednesday that it was recalling the three textbooks in which the term appears. The president of the French national Jewish body CRIF (Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions), Yonathan Arfi, condemned the misrepresentation of October 7. He said it is “a falsification of history and an unacceptable legitimisation of terrorism by Hamas, which this work notably fails to describe as a terrorist organsation”. President Macron said in a post on X that “a baccalaureat revision textbook which falsifies the facts” is “intolerable”. He added: “Revisionism has no place in the Republic. I have called on the government to take all necessary action.” Hachette has launched an internal probe “to determine how such a mistake could occur” and is recalling an estimated 2,000 copies of the textbooks. The publisher said the books will be corrected and redistributed as soon as possible. Company 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”.

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