Oriane Sachs-Bernstein ’26 spent the summer of 2025 in Massafer Yatta, West Bank, doing protective presence. Following a six-month-long ban on Instagram, Sachs-Bernstein regained her profile in February 2026, on which she currently has over 3,500 followers, and began posting content she made while in Palestine. SachsBernstein is one of the founding members of Mac for Palestine, a student-led organization that raises awareness and promotes activism against Israeli violence enacted upon Palestinians following Oct. 7, 2023. Sachs-Bernstein agreed to sit down with The Mac Weekly and share their experiences of activism in Palestine, at Macalester and their insights on the effectiveness of social media. This interview has been lightly edited for readability and length.
The way I found out about this whole story was when you started posting on your Instagram again a few weeks ago, which was after you were banned for six months. Could you tell me a bit more about why you were banned?
It’s actually an insane story. This was an Instagram account that I had since I was like 11 years old that was banned after this random Zionist, who doesn’t even live in the state of Minnesota, nor is a Mac alum, reported me repeatedly. He actually found my account through the Mac for Palestine account. There were times where I would be reposting something from my Instagram onto Mac for Palestine Instagram and I think that’s how he found my Instagram. He was reporting me when I was posting stuff about Palestine, and claimed it was violating Instagram’s terms of service for showing violence terrorism.
Obviously, that is an accusation that people who are pro-Palestine have to face all the time. Even if it doesn’t even [relate to] armed assistance, saying you care about Palestinian lives, you’ll get people yelling at you that you are a terrorist supporter. Now that I’ve gotten the account back, I’m re-sharing everything from my summer there to try to amplify everything that I documented.
How did you get involved with the pro-Palestine activism at Macalester?
I was already a political person before Oct. 7, but Oct. 7 changed my life. My life and my college career has been structured by Israel’s genocide in Gaza. A few weeks after Oct. 7, a group of Macalester students that I was a part of met up, and we decided that there needed to be a Palestine solidarity group on campus. And so with them, I co-founded Mac for Palestine and have led it ever since.
After Oct. 7, I wrestled with ‘what are my moral obligations as a human and as a Jew to Palestinians?’ I see my work in Mac for Palestine as forcing the campus community at every level to wrestle alongside me with our moral obligations to Palestinians. To know that it’s our taxes and our tuition dollars and Macalester investments that all work together to facilitate the normalization of Israel’s apartheid regime and the occupation in the genocide.
You were in the West Bank in the summer of 2025 as a “protective presence.” Could you explain what protective presence is?
A protective presence is a nonviolent form of human rights and land defense work. It happens all over the occupied territories and other places too. You live alongside and with Palestinians and accompany them on their daily tasks. I lived in Massafer Yatta, in Area C of the West Bank, which is where Israel has legislatively the most control and where it has the highest rate of settler tax and home demolitions. The main goal of protective presence is that your presence there makes settlers less likely to attack Palestinians, and if they still attack, we’re there to document what happens. This has changed a little bit since Oct. 7, and how emboldened Israel has become in the descent into fascism, which is reflected in the settler attacks and in their lack of care about an international audience.
On a daily basis, I would be sleeping for a couple nights at a time with different Palestinian families, and I would be accompanying them on their daily tasks — grazing their flock, helping cook. When a settler attack occurs with the family I’m staying at, or if you hear about another one in a neighboring village, you’d go to wherever the settler attack is happening.
How did you learn about this type of work? Is it run by an organization?
I was originally actually going to the West Bank to intern with an organization called Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Project, which provides free legal representation for Palestinian political prisoners who are held in concentration camps. However, about two weeks before I was supposed to be going away, two things happened.
First was the Twelve-Day War between Israel and Iran, so my flight was canceled, and travel to the region was prohibited, but I was still planning to go and get as close as I could and then work my way by land to the West Bank. Then, under the Donald Trump administration, in a fraudulent case, Addameer was designated a foreign terrorist organization, which means I could be prosecuted up to 25 years for working for them. It was crazy timing, because had I gone two weeks before, I would already be working for an organization that is now considered a terrorist organization.
So I ended up just doing protective presence work in Massafer Yatta. I had known about protective presence because, as an activist who spends a lot of time following things going on in the West Bank, I followed other activists who had done protective presence.
+972 Magazine recently published an article, which said “Protective presence is premised on the idea that Israeli settlers and soldiers treat fellow Israeli citizens and foreign nationals with greater restraint than Palestinians. But these assumptions have started to break down, as activists increasingly fall victim to physical attacks, military restrictions and deportation, while violence against Palestinians continues to intensify.”
What are your thoughts on this and how has your perception of protective presence changed now that you have participated in it?
Yeah, the quote is absolutely true. Activists that do protective presence are constantly thinking ‘How can we be more effective? What strategies can we implement that will have more efficacy in reducing settler terrorist violence?’
As Israel descends further and further into fascism and is met with impunity for their war crimes and their genocide can be broadcasted the citizens of Israel feel that their actions too will be met with impunity. I think, as a protective presence activist, with plans to go back, I continue listening to Palestinians on the ground to understand their reality. And I’m following the directions that I’m being asked to do.
Something that always has to be reckoned with is how powerless you feel. I felt so powerless all the time in the West Bank, watching violence unfold and not being able to do more to stop it. Times where I’m watching people be beaten and attacked, and I want to put myself in front of the settler terrorists. I want them to have to choose either to stop or to punch a pretty, white Jewish girl in the face, which will get media attention, and maybe have a response from the Zionist entity. But that’s not what I’m there to do.
That’s not what the Palestinians are asking for, and at the end of the day, it wouldn’t change the system of occupation that exists if I were to do that. And so there’s a lot of constraint having to just watch crimes be committed while being held back from being able to do anything, anything more to stop it.
As protective presence becomes less effective in deterring settler attacks, that feeling of powerlessness for activists only increases. But that feeling of powerlessness just shows that we have to continue thinking about constantly updating and evolving our tactics to fight fascism as fascists evolve and heighten and increase their terrorist violence.
Do you think social media is an effective way of raising awareness about this sort of violence?
I think the fact that so much repression exists on social media, the fact that when I post a cute selfie and get however many views and likes and I watch myself be shadowbanned every time I post about Palestine shows that. I think every Mac student knows the critique of infographic activism and understands the limitations of trying to resist on a site run by fascists that support authoritarian fascist regimes. Social media will never be the primary sites of struggle, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not also sites of struggle.
I recently read Professor FauthBühler’s article published in the Inquisitive Mind Magazine about portrayals of violence in the media and its impact on our empathy. There, she suggests that frequent exposure to representations of violence enacted upon others can lead to desensitization and normalization of violence. Some of the Instagram stories that you and other activists post are quite graphic. What are your thoughts about the effectiveness of sharing this sort of imagery?
I work really hard to re-sensitize myself all the time to violence, having spent so much time watching this genocide, watching the war that we’re currently in unfold. It is so hard to understand that our brains and bodies protect us from feeling the weight and reality of that by either desensitizing ourselves or by stopping us from looking at these pictures and posts because it’s so f—ing horrible and painful. I know I can’t feel it and connect to it all of the time. It drives me crazy, and I have to put up boundaries for myself about it.
I think we have an absolute responsibility and a duty to understand what our tax dollars and what our country and our college is helping support and make possible. I don’t think you can do that without seeing pictures. You have to look at pictures of Gaza. You have to understand. You have to look at videos of attacks in the West Bank. My comfort and avoiding the distress is not a sufficient reason for avoiding that. Sometimes I wish I could just be hanging out and chatting, but I just saw this post that really upset me, and I have to talk about it, and get over the feeling of “I’m annoying because I’m always talking about Palestine and how it makes me feel.”
But I think that suffering deserves to be witnessed. I think it’s really terrible that I’m sitting alone in my room and watching babies die all the time. That’s not good for me or anyone. I wish we had more of a collective way to process. That’s why Mac for Palestine tries to have spaces during our meetings to have time to just talk about what we’re seeing and what’s going on and talk with other people about it.
I did share videos where you could see graphic violence occurring, and I imagine that it’s a hard watch for people watching my stories — it was hard to watch in person. I’m grateful for others’ care and willingness to be uncomfortable and distressed to see what’s happening in the West Bank, and I wish people were more willing to be uncomfortable and distressed in order to sit with and act on the truth of what our government and college and city enables.