Sari Hanafi: commissioned by Le Monde, then turned down.

In October-November 2025, Le Monde commissioned an op-ed on "post-Gaza" from the French-Palestinian sociologist Sari Hanafi, a former president of the International Sociological Association. After two weeks of silence, the paper turned the piece down. The stated reason was vocabulary: describing Hamas's actions in terms of "armed resistance" did not match the paper's approach, and the gap between the two perspectives was judged irreconcilable. Orient XXI published the rejected piece on 13 November 2025 together with Hanafi's reply to the paper, framing the episode alongside the cancellation of a conference on Palestine at the Collège de France following government pressure.

Hanafi says he was surprised to be asked at all, given the paper's editorial line, which he places close to those of Libération and Le Figaro. He notes that Le Monde declines to call events in Gaza a genocide, unlike the FIDH, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, B'Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel, and that international law recognises a right to resist an occupation running since 1967. What troubled him most was not the word but the brief: he was asked to confine himself to how Gazans experience the aftermath, leaving aside how Israelis and Euro-American powers will face their own. He reads this as a role assigned to him: acceptable as an informant on Gaza, never as a voice entitled to judge the global North. He cites a precedent: an op-ed answering Macron's remarks on "Islamic separatism" was refused by both Le Monde and Libération while he chaired the International Sociological Association. A systematic content analysis he ran at the time found no op-eds by French Muslims in the major dailies during that campaign; even Farhad Khosrokhavar could not place a critique.