Israeli self-defence

BORHAN JIANG

In Enough, Jennifer Lopez plays a woman who is tired of being physically abused by her former husband and learns to defend herself – with krav maga, a combat and self-defence system that originated in Israel.

In the1940s, a Jewish boxing and wrestling champion named Imi Lichtenfeld, who had spent a substantial part of his adult life fighting Nazi thugs in the Slovakian capital of Bratislava, immigrated to Israel. His talent was noticed by the head of the Haganah (which became the Israel Defence Forces), who recruited him to teach specialized fitness training, including wrestling and hand-to-hand combat.

For the next 50 years, Lichtenfeld and his students devoted themselves to creating a combat and self-defence system, which could be learned quickly by soldiers, but which was also effective against immediate dangers in battle. Krav means fight in Hebrew and maga means contact, so the direct translation of krav maga is contact combat.

According to the International Krav Maga Federation (IKMF) website, “In 1964, Imi retired from the Israeli military and began adapting and modifying krav maga to civilian needs.... To disseminate his method, Imi established two training centres, one in Tel Aviv and the other in Netanya. He trained teams of krav maga instructors, who were accredited by him and the Israeli Ministry of Education. He also created the Israeli Krav Maga Association in 1978.”

Krav maga is now taught to police, Mossad and even schoolchildren in Israel. Many new techniques and teaching methods have been adapted to help average Joes and Janes to defend themselves in dangerous situations and, today, this fighting and self-defence system can be learned by anyone in the world.

What makes krav maga different from other martial arts are its main focus and training method. Survival is krav maga’s sole purpose. All martial arts were created with the same purpose as krav maga, however, as time progressed, some of these martial arts evolved into sports, like judo, or a mediation regime, like tai chi, and no longer have as their purpose survival.

In addition, unlike boxing, which requires top physical condition to perform, everyone can learn and perform krav maga. When the IDF created krav maga, it wanted all of its soldiers to be able to learn and use this system. As Avi Moyal, the director of the IKMF, has said, “As long the person can get up from the couch, he or she can do krav maga.” However, this does not mean that krav maga training is easy: this system combines modern psychology and sports science in order to push its student to their mental and physical limit as they could be on the street.

A typical krav maga class starts with a game that closely resembles rugby. These games train people in aggression, cardio and reflexes. Later in the class, instructors will teach several defence techniques that are based upon reflexes instead of muscle memory.

To test whether the techniques have been learned properly, assistant instructors with full body armor will jump out of nowhere and attack their students with rubber knives or dummy pistols. These attacks are random and not rehearsed, and trainers try to be as realistic as possible. They know this training might save a student’s life one day. In order to be as realistic as possible, some krav maga schools will even conduct these exercises on the street or on the bus – one school in Germany rents a nightclub for training. Locally, several gyms offer krav maga programs.

Borhan Jiang is a Vancouver freelance writer. He teaches martial arts at Raw Academy Vancouver (rawacademyvancouver.com).

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