Entangled Others: Intergroup Connectivity in Racialization—Israel/Palestine and Beyond

This article develops a novel framework for conceptualizing othering and racialization by foregrounding an underexamined phenomenon: intergroup connectivity. Using Israel/Palestine as a case study, it examines how the othering and racialization of one group, such as Palestinians, are linked to those of others, including African asylum seekers, faraway Indigenous peoples, migrant workers, and non-European Jewish Israelis. The article introduces a typology of four such intergroup connections: “penal borrowing”, where mechanisms created to penalize one group are later extended to another; “justificatory analogy”, where parallels are drawn between groups to legitimize othering and racialization; “colligation”, the grouping of multiple minoritized groups into a single category; and “conflation”, where one group’s members are targeted after being mistaken for another’s. As such dynamics are not unique to Israel/Palestine, this typology offers a valuable tool for analyzing the interconnected and multi-sited nature of othering and racialization across diverse contexts.