John Abughattas on Forced Expulsion, Political Domination, & Love as Politics
John Abughattas is a graduate student in the Philosophy Department at Harvard. His dissertation will provide an account of the “right to return” for forcibly displaced people that (novelly) does not rely on territorial claims. Within the department, he is also interested in settler colonialism, minority rights, transitional justice, immigration, and political legitimacy.
Olivia Pasquerella
How did you come into philosophy, and why do you stay in it?
John Abughattas
With moral and political philosophy in particular, I liked that we were making arguments about how things ought to be, not merely describing how they are now because, you know, I thought that the way things are now is not good. Things ought to be different.
In other fields, the extent of the kinds of claims I could make was describing the world as it is. This is just like that Marx quote, and I do not remember the exact wording, but it is something like, “It’s not just about describing the world in various ways. The point is to change it.” I found that specifically doing normative moral and political philosophy allowed me to do that.
OP
Why is it that philosophy gets to venture the claim about what ought to be? For me, that is usually what political debate concerns — not what things actually are but how they ought to be. I think that in the world outside of this institution, people are much more often talking about what ought to be done. So why can theory be the tool to make prescriptive or normative claims?
JA
People are making normative claims all the time in all kinds of different disciplines. They just are not necessarily recognizing them as such. For instance, people will venture claims to efficiency as what is most valuable. They think they are just making a claim that is obvious or that does not rely on some kind of philosophical or moral premise, but it very clearly does.
So it is not that normativity is siloed off in philosophy — it is everywhere. I think part of the task of philosophers is to try to get people to recognize they are making philosophical claims all the time in ways they do not necessarily realize.
OP
Where do you see that coming up the most in the world today? Where are people making philosophical claims but not recognizing it?
JA
In the class I am teaching now, we are having a discussion about immigration — when people are entitled to immigrate, and when states have the right to refuse immigration or to deport unauthorized migrants — and these are difficult moral questions. But what you will see in discussions about immigration now is that Republicans will take a position of, “Well, the United States has complete authority to decide who is within its territorial boundaries, and so anyone who is not authorized to be here can be permissibly removed.” That is a philosophical position one can take in discussions about immigration, immigrants’ rights, and the territorial rights of the state. If you recognize it as such and you begin to ask questions about it, you see it is not a very plausible position, because the absolute authority of the state has to be reconciled with the moral claims that individuals can make to belong to a society or to have the right to occupy a certain place, even if they have not been formally recognized as a member and if they initially came here unauthorized.
That kind of view automatically dismisses, say, certain claims made about a person who was brought to the U.S. by their parents at a young age, for whom this is the only society they have ever known. This kind of claim is brought up in popular discussions of immigration policy today, but it is fundamentally a moral claim, about this person's moral interests in being able to remain in the United States. We are not just making the arguments that you will often hear like, “Well, the U.S. needs immigrants for its economy. The economy will collapse if they deport all the unauthorized migrants,” or the more crude version of that [statement]: “Who's gonna mow your lawn and make your coffee if you deport all the immigrants?” These arguments come from the self-interest of American citizens or [are arguments] from economic efficiency.
But this does not exhaust the range of considerations we have to make. There are distinctly moral considerations, and even when you are making an argument ostensibly in support of the rights of undocumented people, there should not be a normativity that reinforces existing systems of oppression, like reinforcing the labor hierarchy that we are talking about.
OP
I wanted to ask about your dissertation. Could you tell our readers what it is about and what the process of working on it has been like for the last few years?
JA
Yeah, my dissertation is about two things. One is: What is the wrong of forced expulsion? So, what is the moral complaint one has if they have been forcibly expelled from the territory that they live in? And then, in conjunction with that, what form of repair are you owed if you have suffered forced expulsion? And the answer I have been developing to that is that you're owed the right of return. I'll have to explain how my view of the right of return differs from other views that readers might have come across.
But to start with my view of forced expulsion, I have identified both in the philosophical literature and in public consciousness that people think the primary moral complaint that one has if they've been forcibly expelled is a territorial claim. So the claim is, “I have a right to that territory,” or “I have a right to that land,” whether it's in a property sort of way, or in the way of the territorial rights of a people or of a state.
But that is the central complaint: one about land, one about territory. So the view you get of the right of return that comes out of this understanding of forced expulsion is one in which it is a claim to territory, a claim to reclaim land that was taken from you.
And this is a kind of intuitive view to a lot of people, especially because from the first-person perspective of someone who has suffered forced expulsion, people recount the way in which they miss their home, they miss the town they grew up in, they feel that it has been taken from them. And when they describe their aspirations or their demands of others, it is for them to give back what has been taken from them. I do not mean to dismiss this as a legitimate way that people understand the injustice that they have experienced, but in terms of giving a philosophical account, I do not think it is the right approach for a few reasons.
The first is that in general, I am very skeptical of these kinds of claims to territory. In fact, an earlier version of what I was doing for a dissertation was a defense of both a unified global political community and free movement across it. So I do not think people have a claim to necessarily exclude others from the territory that they currently reside in. I think generally, people have rights of free movement.
And so for the kind of forced expulsion as territorial violation claim to work, you would need to assert that the people who were expelled had some kind of strong exclusive claim, to the use of the territory and to the whole of it. But I do not think that is tenable if you have these background commitments about people being able to freely move and reside in different places.
OP
Where does that [view] place the role of the state? Because you have mentioned a global political community and a radical sense of freedom of movement, are you also thinking about a kind of approach to the abolition of states?
JA
This is not part of my dissertation now, but what I was imagining was if there is “a state,” there is [just] one, and everyone is a member of it, which now puts constraints on the way that I am fleshing out my views about forced expulsion and the right of return because I have this broader commitment that I think a lot of people on the Left also share.
OP
And so, what is the alternative to articulating the right of return through territorial claims?
JA
The alternative that I am trying to develop is one which describes this general phenomenon of political domination, which manifests in empirically different ways.
So the kind of political domination that people have recognized and theorized about is the more obvious kind, where you have a group of people living within the territory of a state, and that state dominates them through direct application of various unjust laws. So obvious examples of this are chattel slavery in the United States. Slavery was taking place within the boundaries of the United States, done by citizens of the United States, with the support of the laws and institutions of the state.
Or other examples are instances of apartheid, where there is one government that rules over a territory and it imposes differential laws favoring one group of people over another group of people. Those are recognizable kinds of political domination. But I want to ask, suppose you had an apartheid condition, in which Group A is dominating Group B, and then Group A decides, well, we want to be completely rid of Group B. We do not want to be dealing with them anymore. And so they forcibly expel all the members of Group B, and the members of Group B now live outside of the territory of the state, and the state has borders that are erected to keep them out.
My question, then, is in virtue of removing them from the territory, is it the case that Group A no longer imposes a kind of political domination on Group B?
And I think the answer that should come out is “No, sorry.” The answer is they still are engaged in a kind of political domination. It is just the empirical description of that political domination has shifted. It is no longer one of apartheid in which you have people cohabitating in a space and one group being treated unjustly on the basis of racial difference. Instead, it has transformed into domination by exclusion.
I think our best philosophical understanding is that there is a general phenomenon in which Israel is imposing political domination on Palestinians, but empirically, it manifests in different ways with respect to different populations. So plausibly in the West Bank, it manifests as a condition of apartheid, and it may also manifest as a condition of apartheid within the state of Israel, in its treatment of Palestinian citizens of Israel. But at a bare minimum, even if we are not going to call that apartheid, there is a kind of systemic racial injustice that Palestinian citizens of Israel experience. That is a form of political domination. In Gaza, we have seen the form of political domination become genocide.
And on the view I am developing, [for] Palestinians who have been expelled, it is not the case that they're no longer subject to that structure of domination simply because they have been expelled. Rather the empirical shape that the domination they experience takes is now one of exclusion. They are dominated by the fact that the state of Israel refuses to recognize their claims in any way and says, “You are no longer within our boundaries, so you are a complete stranger. We don't recognize your ability to make claims on other members of this society, and we don't recognize your ability to make moral claims upon the state.”
OP
So, this is the “Love Issue” of Zeitgeist — how do you think these ideas connect to love? Can love of land, love of people, or love more broadly be a motivator for pursuing political aims? What role does love have in politics?
JA
[On the idea of loving one’s people,] there is a quote by Hannah Arendt in which she explains why she does not love Jews as a group. When I read it, it captured how I think about this issue.
OP
The Harvard Review of Philosophy held its undergraduate philosophy conference this weekend, and someone was talking about Hannah Arendt's love and anti-politics and her response to James Baldwin's “The Fire Next Time.” I believe the argument was that love is a category error in politics: It exists in a personal realm but not a political one. The most you can have is a cautious respect for other people in politics but not a total love.
JA
So Gershom Scholem, who was Arendt’s friend, criticized her and said:
“There is a concept known as ‘Ahavat Yisrael,’ [or] ‘love of the Jewish people.’ And you, Hannah [1], as in so many intellectuals who come from the German Left, I find little trace of this.”
And she replied: “You are quite right — I am not moved by any ‘love’ of this sort, and for two reasons: I have never in my life ‘loved’ any people or collective – neither the German people, nor the French, nor the American, nor the working class or anything of that sort. I indeed love ‘only’ my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons.
Secondly, this ‘love of the Jews’ would appear to me, since I am myself Jewish, as something rather suspect. I cannot love myself or anything which I know is part and parcel of my own person. To clarify this, let me tell you of a conversation I had in Israel with a prominent political personality who was defending the – in my opinion disastrous – non-separation of religion and state in Israel. What [she] said – I am not sure of the exact words any more – ran something like this: ‘You will understand that, as a socialist, I, of course, do not believe in God; I believe in the Jewish people.’ I found this a shocking statement and, being too shocked, I did not reply at the time. But I could have answered: the greatness of this people was once that it believed in God, and believed in Him in such a way that its trust and love towards Him was greater than its fear. And now this people believes only in itself? What good can come out of that? Well, in this sense I do not ‘love’ the Jews, nor do I ‘believe’ in them; I merely belong to them as a matter of course, beyond dispute or argument.” [2]
But do I love Palestinians? I think I tend to be a kind of moralist, in a non-derogatory sense to myself of: It does not matter who I love because that does not determine what my moral obligations are to other people. I have moral obligations to people I love. I have moral obligations to people I hate. And what is important to me is that I always treat people rightly, regardless of my own feelings about them.
OP
But still, what importance, if any, would you give to love in a political realm, if you have this universal sense of moral responsibility to people regardless of love?
JA
I think most people are not moral robots, as I sometimes treat myself, so I think love can be an incredibly strong motivator to spring people into political action. For some people, that might be the love of abstract collections, like groups, but I do not think it has to be on that scale to be effective.
For instance, I think a lot of people now are seeing their neighbors being ripped away from them by ICE. And they do not know every undocumented person. They do not love every undocumented person, but they might have really liked their neighbor. And I think for a lot of people, that is enough to motivate them – at least, I hope so.
OP
Do you think that love is a specific motivating force? It sounds like you cast a little bit of doubt on the concept of loving everybody. Was it Eric Fromm that had this idea that to love one you must love everyone?
JA
I think that what matters universally is moral obligations, and locally, love can motivate us to act for the sake of the universal – that I might only love my neighbor, or I might only love the people I know, but to give [and] express my love to them, I need to act in a way that addresses the claims and concerns of many people I have never met and don't even know exist.
OP
I think we have hit the speed-run version of the interview. I have just a few super quick questions. Do you have a favorite romantic movie?
JA
This is tough. This might be recency bias, but “Your Name.” The director is Makato Shinkai.
OP
Do you have a favorite romantic album?
JA
Asking for the sex playlist? Let me look through my Spotify. There is this song that I think is super underrated. It is from a video game from the early 2000s called Jet Set Radio Future. The song is called “The Concept of Love.”
OP
Last question: Do you love any philosophers?
JA
Not romantically, because my wife is not a philosopher. There was a thing I did when I was an undergrad where I would throw birthday parties for my favorite philosophers, on their actual birthdays. Marx was born on May 5, Cinco de Mayo. So we had Cinco de Marxo.
OP
How do you celebrate Cinco de Marxo?
JA
You have Capital reading group.
Interview conducted by Olivia Pasquerella on June 9, 2025.
[1] Hannah Duane, a Harvard undergraduate concentrating in Social Studies and Philosophy! Reach out to editors@harvardphilosophy.com if you are interested in getting involved with or presenting work at the Second Annual Undergraduate Philosophy Conference in Spring 2026.
[2] Quoted from Hannah Arendt’s The Jewish Writings by Judith Butler, “‘I Merely Belong to Them,’” London Review of Books, May 10, 2007, Vol. 29 No. 9 Edition, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n09/judith-butler/i-merely-belong-to-them.