Kapap
קפ״פThe older Israeli close-combat system, a predecessor of Krav Maga. It emerged in the late 1930s in the Haganah and the Palmach.
Quick Facts
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Organisation & Competition
What the style is built from
Editorial rating on a 0–3 scale, based on how much room each area gets in ordinary training.
About Kapap
Kapap is an acronym of the Hebrew krav panim el panim, "face-to-face combat". It is the older of the Israeli close-combat systems and in many ways a predecessor of Krav Maga, with which it is often confused today. It emerged in the late 1930s in the Aliyah immigration camps and, before the founding of the state, became part of the training of the Haganah and the Palmach. It has no single founder, and this page therefore leaves the field empty: it was a set of methods that arose in parallel. Maishel Horovitz assembled a stick-fighting system in the 1930s but only learned in 1959 that soldiers were being trained in it. Chaim Pe'er is named as the founder of the modern form of kapap. The syllabus was mixed and practical from the start. It covered boxing, judo, jujutsu and karate, together with knife and stick work and the use of cold weapons. Kapap was thus not a closed style but a selection of what could be learned quickly and used in the field — the same reasoning from which Krav Maga later grew. The difference from Krav Maga is historical rather than technical. Krav Maga is the later, organisationally unified branch tied to the name of Imi Lichtenfeld, while kapap remained the label for the older, looser body of method. Modern kapap is run today by several international structures; the European and Asian parts are coordinated by instructors acting on behalf of Avi Nardia and Chaim Pe'er.
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.