WHAT IS HAGANAH?
This is haganah.
The word HaganaH, meaning "DEFENSE" in Hebrew, is the true Evolution of Israeli Martial Arts to include; Kapap, Krav Maga, Lotar and Hisardut. This Military based Martial Art comes straight from the battlefields of Israel and was founded by Israeli Special Forces Commando Master Mike Lee Kanarek.
The HaganaH Basic Training Principles
The HaganaH basic training principles are simple. Avoid, evade, escape, demolish. If you can, escape an escalating situation. If you are attacked and cannot immediately escape, do not assume you can judge your attacker's ultimate intent. Therefore, demolish the attacker. Be measured in your response when choosing how the fight will finally end. Bring the opponent in, jam his attack, contain, control, demolish.
Students are drilled to create a mindset that reacts to a violent assault by immediately switching from a victim to a predatory aggressor. Every touch is designed to create damage. Every tactic has both a defensive and offensive element. Techniques are overlapped to "short-circuit" and overwhelm the attacker. There are no rules of engagement. Every technique builds on instinctive responses.
Understand other systems and recognize their application in an engagement. Exploit their weaknesses. Stay up to date and keep enhancing what you do based upon real life experience. This system is designed to enable all of these things to occur.
The teaching approach
The teaching approach is designed to mirror military style teaching while recognizing the time demands and typical fitness levels of the working adult. It presents virtually the entire content of the system-hand-to-hand, knife defenses, gun disarms, and ground fighting. We use rapid comprehensive training for our hand-to-hand. Empty hand against the knife components use limited core techniques’ and a process known as technique funneling.
No fight has a blueprint, so different initial attacks require different initial responses. But the system has identified four common positions that can be achieved for nearly all attacks within one to three moves, regardless of the initial attack. HaganaH calls these carefully tested positions of control and dominance “points of reference”. The funneling effect of the system is designed to bring the opponent to the points of reference. From each of the four points of reference, students are taught virtually identical sequences of strikes (called "objective" options) to be used to restrain, incapacitate or terminate the attacker.
This vastly reduces the number of techniques a student must become capable of, making learning and muscle memory programming (reactive programming) very fast. In combat things don't always go as planned, that's where the HaganaH funnel techniques excel. By designing its techniques around the points of reference, HaganaH accommodates many situations and practitioner skill levels. The point of reference becomes a familiar and comfortable place.
Regardless of how the fight started or whether the initial self-defense reaction was even correct, all HaganaH practitioners battle to quickly get to one of those landmark positions. They seek that familiar place in an unfamiliar landscape where they can be completely confident they can find their way home, no matter how long or little they have trained. Once they reach that position the adversary is theirs. When it comes down to it, it’s about intelligence gathering. In the military, the key to surviving an engagement is often good intelligence. It's the same in the street. We focus on integrating training that brings our students a clear understanding of the adversary. Whether it is teaching them the knife or teaching them likely tactics used by practitioners of other popular fighting styles, it all serves to make them more capable of defending themselves. From all perspectives, HaganaH is a complete hardcore fighting system of combat proven tactics from a place that has always had the need---Israel.
There is no ego in the HaganaH system.
Additionally, we are constantly evaluating other methodologies such as those used by the various U.S. Special Forces to add in any of their techniques, which would strengthen the system. There is no ego in the HaganaH system. It uses the best of the best in self-defense and combat methodologies.
All techniques in the HaganaH system lead practitioners to one of three points of reference (destination points) with three objective options- restraint, incapacitation, or termination. By limiting the variety of combat strategies, learning time is accelerated and depth of understanding and skill levels are increased. Our practitioners become adept at quickly reacting to attacks and if necessary improvising to achieve these few points of reference. Once achieved, our practitioners feel very confident and comfortable that, even though the engagement may not be over, it is theirs to win. This, in turn, will protect you and yours when evil knocks on your door.