own me an article in an activist magazine that pointed out how many of the U.S. neoconservatives are Jewish. He also showed me a letter to the editor that he had written, in which he acknowledged how contentious this assertion was but defended it as informative and fair. We started into a tense discussion, a fractal of the larger Muslim-Jewish conflict, but then cut short our argument to get ready for the workshop.
With this unresolved tension between Zaid and me, the workshop started awkwardly and got worse. The participants were feeling beaten down by the regression in civil rights in the United States and discouraged about the poor results their existing strategies were producing. They didn't think my leadership of the meeting, with my white and foreign colleagues, was legitimate, and they were unhappy with the process we were using. Harsh power struggles swirled around and within the room. Eventually it became obvious that I wasn't wanted in the workshop at all, and so, feeling humiliated, I gave up. I left the group to lead itself and went back to my room.
That night I had a terrifying dream. A gang was harassing me mercilessly-crowding and shoving and hitting me-and I couldn't escape. Eventually I became so hopeless and despairing that I pulled the pin out of a hand grenade and blew myself up with all of them: I became a suicide bomber. Through this dream I experienced the terrible, debilitating feeling of being on the receiving end of power-over.
By 2008, my understanding of the dynamics of power and love was taking shape through such experiences and reflections. Then I had another encounter with aboriginal issues, this time in Australia. I was invited to Melbourne by an Australian aboriginal leader named Patrick Dodson. He is well known for his decades of varied struggles-mobilizations, negotiations, invocations, lawsuits-to address the challenges faced by his people, and specifically for his efforts to achieve reconciliation between abo