Britain's Home Office has refused entry to Andreas Malm, a Swedish academic who once characterized the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 assault on Israel as at its core a liberation act. He was due to appear on a London panel next week with Huda Ammori, a co-founder of Palestine Action.
Malm is a senior lecturer in human ecology at Lund University. He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that a letter from the Home Office informed him his presence was "not conducive to the public good." The letter offered no further reasoning. The Home Office said it does not comment on individual cases.
The event, organized by the left-wing magazine Tribune, is the only reason Malm can identify for the ban. He said he could not "see any other explanation" and has asked the Home Office to justify its decision. Malm stressed that he has never joined Palestine Action, never publicly backed it and never given it money.
"The only link to Palestine Action is her as a person," he said. He accused the government of applying "guilt by association" and described the move as a "severe restriction on the free exchange of ideas."
Malm conceded that his October 7 comments could have prompted the decision. He made them in a December 2023 talk, in which he also condemned the killing of civilians as "deplorable." He argued, however, that those views had been public for a long time. Britain admitted him as recently as May to deliver a talk.
"I don't expect the British state to agree with me on Palestine or climate or anything. What I expect the British state to do is to continue to let me enter the country and to discuss with colleagues, with people who disagree with me - as I have done for years."
Malm's books include How to Blow up a Pipeline (2021) and The Destruction of Palestine is the Destruction of the Earth (2025).
Palestine Action activists have already faced British courts. In May, a jury convicted activist Samuel Corner of grievous bodily harm. During the group's August 2024 break-in at an Elbit Systems factory in Filton, near Bristol, he struck a police sergeant with a sledgehammer and fractured her spine.
