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During the centuries of rule by various kingdoms and empires in both antiquity and medieval periods, a public aversion against homosexuality was evidenced in the patriarchal religions which predominated in Israel at such times. Little is known about the history of homosexuality in ancient Israel apart from either highly-mythologized or highly-erased references (i.e., the story of David and Jonathan or speculation on the Sexuality of Jesus).
In 1857, the Ottoman Empire, which ruled the area of modern-day Israel and Palestine as part of Ottoman Syria, abolished its existing sodomy laws.
Beginning in 1882, Ashkenazi Jewish migrants from the Russian Empire flee to Israel in a series of waves to escape rising anti-Semitism, encouraged by Theodor Herzl's Zionism. It is not known if the growth in nuance for homosexuality began with any of the early Russian settlers, as the territory from which they had migrated had largely been populated with homophobic cultural traits; however, as Jewish Russians were only recently beginning to integrate into mainstream Russian society away from the Pale of Settlement, views on homosexuality likely sharply differed between Jewish intellectuals and religious clerics when migrating to, and establishing the agricultural settlements in the area.
In 1918, the Ottoman Empire is dissolved, and the territory is occupied by the United Kingdom. In 1923 the United Kingdom is given the territory as part of the British Mandate for Palestine. By default, existing laws against "buggery" are installed by the colonial administration.
In 1963, the attorney General declared that sodomy laws installed under the British mandate would not be enforced. In 1988, sexual relations between persons of the same sex was officially made legal.
In 2001, Pride is first held in Eilat (Eilat Pride).
On January 10, 2005, the Supreme Court ruled that a lesbian couple is able to legally adopt each other's children. During the past 15 years that Tal and Avital Jarus-Hakak have lived together, they have had a total of three children. In November 2005, a groundbreaking court decision in Israel ruled that a lesbian spouse could officially adopt a child born to her current partner by artificial insemination from an anonymous sperm donor; this ruling came despite protests by the minority Orthodox Jewish parliamentary parties.
Following the supreme court ruling, a lesbian couple was allowed to adopt each other's biological children on February 12, 2006. Before that, gay partners of parents were granted guardianship over their partner's children.
On March 10, 2009, the Tel Aviv family court ruled that former Knesset member Uzi Even and his partner, Amit Kama, can legally adopt their 30-year-old foster son, Yossi, making them the first same-sex male couple in Israel whose right of adoption has been legally acknowledged.[2]
On 30 June 2005, the fourth annual Pride march of Jerusalem took place. It had originally been prohibited by a municipal ban which was cancelled by the court. Many of the religious leaders of Jerusalem's Muslim, Jewish and Christian communities had arrived to a rare consensus asking the municipal government to cancel the permit of the paraders. During the parade, a Haredi Jewish man attacked three people with a kitchen knife.
On January 29, 2007, following a Supreme Court ruling ordering them to do so, Jerusalem registered its first gay couple, Avi and Binyamin Rose.[3]
Another parade, this time billed as an international event,[4] was scheduled to take place in the summer of 2005, but was postponed to 2006 due to the stress on police forces during in the summer of Israel's unilateral disengagement plan. In 2006, it was again postponed due to the Israel-Hezbollah war. It was scheduled to take place in Jerusalem on 10 November 2006, and caused a wave of protests by Haredi Jews around central Israel[5]; the ugliest incident took place during the 2006 Jerusalem gay pride parade.
The Israel National Police had filed a petition to cancel the parade due to foreseen strong opposition. Later, an agreement was reached to convert the parade into an assembly inside the Hebrew University stadium in Jerusalem. 21 June 2007, the Jerusalem Open House organization succeeded in staging a parade in central Jerusalem after police allocated thousands of personnel to secure the general area. The rally planned afterwards was cancelled due to an unrelated national fire brigade strike which prevented proper permits from being issued.
In August 2009, an armed attacker shot dead two people and injured 15 more in an attack on a lesbian and gay centre in Tel Aviv.[6] The incident has been deplored by many organizations and government officials, such as the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, and President Shimon Peres.
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