Ishai Sagi: Not In My Name

Uncut tape of an interview with Ishai Sagi, a lieutenant in the Israeli army who was sentenced to twenty-six days in Israeli military prison for refusing to serve in Palestine. Sagi recounts his story, discussing the reasons for his refusal and his opinion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

0:57Copy video clip URL Title card.

1:05Copy video clip URL Ishai Sagi introduces himself as an Israeli computer programmer and a lieutenant in the artillery unit within the Israeli defense force. 

1:43Copy video clip URL Sagi explains the experience of growing up with the Israeli drafting process. “The Israeli Army is a part of the Israeli society. It’s a very large part, and every child grows up knowing that he one day will be in the army himself.” Sagi talks about his own father’s involvement in the army, the Yom Kippur War in 1973, and the popular political narrative surrounding the Israeli army.

3:25Copy video clip URL Hoffman prods Sagi to explain how this narrative affected his own thinking. “The army is important,” Sagi explains. “The army is the only thing that can protect us and our families from the enemies, and we have to go to the army. We have to do our best to contribute to the army. That’s what I believed in. That’s what I still believe in. There is no other force in Israel that can defend us from the Syrians or the Egyptians if one day they decide that they want to attack.” Sagi talks about being drafted into the army, detailing his experience stationed both as a lieutenant and training officer and adding that he was recently sent to Israeli military prison after refusing to go to Palestine.

5:42Copy video clip URL Hoffman asks Sagi what prompted his refusal. Sagi responds that it was a chain of experiences that did so. “There were a lot of series of actions and of things in the past that got me to the conclusion that it’s bad for us to be in the territories. For us, not for the Palestinians. Afterward, I started thinking about the Palestinians.”

6:16Copy video clip URL Sagi recounts his journey as a soldier, starting in 1975, when he believed in everything that the army stood for and trusted his superiors completely. “An Israeli soldier is not trained to think. A soldier is trained to do what he is told. That’s what they teach you in basic training. And when I went to the territories, that’s what I did. I did what I was told to do.”

7:24Copy video clip URL Sagi explains his work as a soldier at a roadblock between Tulkarm and Netanya checking Palestinian people for work permits and cars for weapons, explaining the weaknesses of the system and the dangers facing Palestinians should they be caught in Israel without a work permit. Sagi adds that many Palestinians would risk going into Israel without such a permit because they needed the money.

9:45Copy video clip URL Sagi talks about the other mission he spent time doing in the Israeli army: helping General Security Service (Shin Bet) men search for weapons and propaganda inside Palestinian houses in the middle of the night. Sagi says that when members of the Shin Bet were unable to find weapons, they would begin shouting at the head of the house to see if any of their neighbors might have weapons, where they would then repeat the process.

10:43Copy video clip URL Sagi talks about being called back to “the territories” as an officer, not as a soldier. “As an officer, I was trained to think. I was trained to analyze situations from a strategic and tactic[al] point of view. It was my obligation to think about those things and notify my superiors if I saw something wrong.” Sagi explains that he received an emergency call of order a month after the start of the Al-Aqsa riots, giving him a week to prepare before going to Palestine. Sagi says a friend tried to dissuade him from going, saying the Israeli army was committing atrocities. Sagi explains his reservations toward such a stance, revealing that he chose to go in order to protect himself and the people he cared about.

13:02Copy video clip URL Sagi recounts his experience as an officer called to Palestine. He repeats the standing orders for opening fire for the area he was assigned to. “The orders were: for every Palestinian you see pick up a rock, shoot him.” Sagi goes over the distress he and his soldiers felt at receiving these orders, as well as the brigade officer’s logic for giving the order: if they did not follow through with the order, many Israeli soldiers would die. “That order was perfectly logical, and we had to do that. We had to shoot even a six-year-old boy on those cliffs if he just picked up a stone.” Sagi explains how the matter was further complicated by the fact that Israeli settlers would throw stones at Palestinian people, doing the very thing they had been told to protect Israeli people from. Sagi and his soldiers, however, had orders to protect the settlers, as they did not have any authority over Israeli civilians. Sagi says how shocking these orders were to him and his soldiers, defining it as “Occupational logic. Kind of twisted, but it’s there. You still have to do that.”

17:33Copy video clip URL Sagi explains his last mission at another settlement, Migdalim. He says that his mission was to protect Migdalim and surrounding roads, though most of the settlement was unoccupied. Sagi talks about advertisements for Migdalim he had seen before, and how those advertisements ran counter to what he actually saw within the settlement. Sagi says that he had to spread his soldiers thinly around Migdalim, and began worrying that people were not patrolling fields around populated Israeli cities. “The fact is,” says Sagi, “that the Israeli settlements were guarded, while the Israeli cities were not.” Sagi argues that to better protect Israel, Israeli forces should have been stationed around the perimeter of the West Bank rather than the settlements inside of it, and how he realized that he wasn’t actually protecting the people he had set out to protect.

22:55Copy video clip URL Sagi moves on to talking about Israeli society, naming a number of issues: rises in domestic violence, drug use, arms dealing, and the way Israeli Arabs are treated by Israeli Jews. Sagi talks about a possible cause for these issues: the types of moral values taught to soldiers during military service. “You suddenly get another moral set of values. You suddenly learn that there are two types of people in Israel: one without any rights, and one with all the rights they can have, and even more than the regular Israeli.” He talks about current military practices in Palestine, explaining the mentality of the Israeli soldier while also emphasizing the effects of these morals: that these practices teach Israeli soldiers to never trust Palestinians, only viewing them as terrorists, and that they creep into other aspects of political and social life. Sagi also tells the story of a Druze officer who was beaten up in Haifa after speaking Arabic.

29:28Copy video clip URL Sagi talks about his determination to do something about the issues he identified. He names the third reason for his refusal: his understanding of the Palestinian side of the conflict. Sagi returns to the young boy he saw while on duty as a soldier, using him to explore how Israeli actions (or even Sagi’s own actions) in Palestine have the potential to spark a cycle of violence and hatred. 

31:38Copy video clip URL Sagi returns to the issue of his past order to shoot any Palestinian citizen holding a rock, working through the morality of the situation. “The question you have to ask yourself here is what are those people doing on that road. This is not Israeli country. This is not Israeli road. What are they doing there?” He also gives an alternative definition for the “infrastructure of terror.”

34:23Copy video clip URL Sagi recaps the points he has made throughout the interview, providing them as his reasons for refusing to be sent to Palestine.

36:21Copy video clip URL Screen fades to black, followed by information about how to contact the Refusers Movement.