An Israeli girl sprays foam during 2017 Yom Ha’atzmaut celebrations in Jerusalem. Students from a Jewish school were attacked April 30 by Israeli teens in Tiberias after foam-spraying got out of hand. Photo by Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images

By Louis Keene May 1, 2025

Milken Community School designed its eighth-grade class trip to provide authentic encounters with Israeli teens, but not the kind that include pepper spray and trips to the ER.

The Jewish day school’s Israel trip took a frightening turn Wednesday when local Jewish teens attacked the students at a public Yom Ha’atzmaut celebration in Tiberias.

Sarah Shulkind, the head of the Los Angeles school, said in a letter to parents that 11 boys and girls were taken to a hospital after roughhousing with shaving foam escalated into a violent confrontation.

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The incident occurred at a promenade in the Galilean coastal city, where 75 Milken students and their chaperones arrived Wednesday night for Independence Day festivities. Some of the students were fooling around with foam spray, a staple of Israeli parties, Shulkind said, but when some local kids got too rowdy, the Milken group moved to a different area.

A few minutes later, Shulkind said, several Israeli teens approached the students “in an aggressive confrontational manner.” She and a teacher saw this happening and tried to separate the groups.

“However,” Shulkind wrote, “tensions rose quickly, and we directed the Milken students to go back to the buses immediately.”

“The Israeli teenagers chased our students and their much older siblings came from the other direction on the promenade and sprayed pepper spray at 10 Milken students,” she continued. “In two cases, our students were also pushed, punched, and kicked as well.”

The police arrived and identified the perpetrators, she said, and all the students were “physically fine” after being checked out at a local hospital.

The Tiberias police department could not be reached for comment.

The situation was “terrifying at moments,” Shulkind said. But she was proud of how her students supported each other through it — washing each other’s eyes out with milk to help mitigate the pepper spray, and coaching each other to breathe when they were panicking.

The incident exposed an inherent tension in Israeli tourism during wartime. Shulkind, who leads one of the largest Jewish day schools in the U.S., said Milken came “as an act of Zionism to experience Israel for all of its wonder and all of its pain post-Oct. 7.”

The group had visited Hostage Square in Tel Aviv earlier in the trip; they spent Yom HaZikaron in schools in the Galilee, experiencing the day of remembrance alongside their Israeli peers.

But the country they are traversing is increasingly beset by frustration and fatigue. The resumption of fighting in Gaza after a nearly two-month ceasefire has required the IDF to call up tens of thousands of reservists, some of whom are refusing to serve. Israel is now seeing the largest protests since the war began.

Nestled along the western coast of the Sea of Galilee, Tiberias was far out of reach of the Hamas-led attack of Oct. 7, 2023. But it has had a taxing 18 months, as Hezbollah missiles, drones and rocket fire have regularly forced residents into bomb shelters. Shulkind — who cancelled last year’s trip because of the war — tried to empathize with the unruly locals.

“These are kids who potentially lost family, or had family displaced, or homes destroyed,” she said on the phone. “There’s been a lot of trauma in Israeli society, and it is very possible, given the location, that they were part of it.”

If Milken had arrived at the Yom Ha’atzmaut celebration wearing face paint and glitter, Shulkind said, then they left with a valuable lesson.

“I think it was really complicated for them, that it was Jewish Israelis,” she said. “And what an interesting experience for them to understand that Israel is a complicated place, and the from-afar version of a country is very different than when you’re in it.”

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