The Israeli way

BUTTE — On an overcast day at the bottom of a gravel pit, Guy Peleg stood by a plywood wall with a door in its center as a man with an assault rifle sidled up to him.

“Go!” Peleg shouted, and the man poked the nose of the rifle out the door, then his head, scanned for bad guys which he quickly neutralized on his way through the door, before switching to a handgun en route to the next bit of cover.

“Fast, fast, fast!” Peleg shouted.

Peleg and a handful of other Israelis were at that gravel pit offering a group of Alaska men a chance to train in the Israeli military’s style of self-defense. He was there with The Mako Group, a manufacturer of weapons’ accessories. The company does weapons training in other countries but hasn’t broken into the U.S. market. At least not yet.

“This is a new venture for us in the U.S.,” said Mako Group CEO Addy Sandler. And the training in Butte this month is the first training session in that U.S. venture.

The men took turns dashing through the course, which featured multiple plywood structures for them to peek around and crouch behind. There were also targets bearing life-sized photos of good guys and bad guys.

Watching the men run through the course, the company’s head of training, Iftach Kissos, said he was impressed how quickly the guys took to the Israeli method of keeping guns in holsters without a round in the chamber. Instead of racking a round and clicking on the safety, Israelis charge the weapon as they draw and point it.

Sandler said the day’s training was for civilians. They do train law enforcement and military personnel abroad and plan to do so in the U.S. as well. But, Kissos said, those two types of training are very different.

“We’re not teaching any kind of offensive actions,” he said of the day’s civilian training. This is strictly self-defense.

Which is what brought Lou Packer out. Packer is a doctor in Wasilla. He said he believes it’s his duty to keep his family safe at all times and is happy to have been taught good methods to do that.

“I basically had no gun experience prior to this class,” Packer said. He took all the classes Mako offered this week and learned a number of skills with handguns and rifles as well as in hand-to-hand combat.

He said it was kind of just by chance he ended up at the class. He happened to see a flier. But he feels guns are like power saws — you shouldn’t use either if you don’t know how.

And how did a group of former Israeli commandos wind up in Alaska teaching firearms courses? Dylan Saunders is how.

Saunders is a sales representative for Mako, based in Anchorage. He said he got hooked in with the company when he was looking to start working as a gun seller but couldn’t find any distributors willing to work with a small-scale seller like himself. He called Mako to talk about a sniper set-up they made and which he felt would have been very useful during his time in the military.

One thing led to another and he signed on with them. When they started talking about where to do their first U.S. training, Saunders suggested Alaska and it all came together.

Well, it wasn’t quite that easy. Saunders said his initial choice for a venue fell through on very short notice. But the Valley came through for him, he said, People he didn’t even know were calling to offer locations.

Kissos said that coming to train people in the U.S., there was a bit of culture shock when he saw that the rumors were true — Americans can buy guns in department stores. It’s not that way in Israel.

“There are very strict regulations about carrying weapons if you’re not in the army,” he said.

But he said the Israeli training method translates well across those cultural lines. The Israelis focus on easily taught, easily learned methods of self-defense. They call their particular martial art Krav Maga. Stylistically, he said, it’s nothing to write home about.

“You could find a better-looking martial art,” Kissos said, but not one that a person can learn the basics of in the span of a week or a day.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.