Dec. 13, 1949 — Mossad Is Established
Reuven Shiloah, the first director of the Mossad, leaves Israel for armistice talks in Rhodes in March 1949. Hugo Mendelson, National Photo Collection of Israel.
Reuven Shiloah, a Foreign Ministry special operations officer, is assigned the task of launching and leading the Institute for Collating and Coordinating Intelligence Operations, the Israeli intelligence agency commonly known as the Mossad. In appointing Shiloah, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion emphasizes Israel’s need for intelligence on the Arab world as the first line of defense to survive among enemies.
Dec. 14, 1858 — Land Deeds Introduced in Palestine
Turkish flags fly over Jerusalem’s Jaffa Gate to honor the Ottoman sultan in 1903. Israeli National Photo Collection.
The Ottoman Empire enacts the Tapu Law, which introduces title deed registration to its Arab provinces under a new land code. The law enhances landowners’ ability to rent to peasant farmers and thus helps the empire collect more taxes. Most of those farmers don’t want ownership, which would expose them to fees, taxes and military service, so the law concentrates ownership among Arab nobles, including many absentee landlords.
Dec. 15, 2016 — Trump Picks Friedman as Ambassador
U.S. Ambassador David Friedman (right) joins Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu aboard a U.S. Navy warship making a port call in Ashdod on Oct. 11, 2018. Kobi Gideon, Israeli Government Press Office, CC BY-SA 3.0.
President-elect Donald Trump announces that he will nominate New York bankruptcy lawyer David Friedman to serve as the U.S. ambassador to Israel. Friedman, a longtime Trump adviser who worked with the presidential campaign on Israel policy, owns a home in Israel, has raised money for the West Bank settlement movement, and has said a two-state solution is neither a Trump priority nor the only path to Middle East peace.
Dec. 16, 1922 — Hebrew Advocate Ben-Yehuda Dies
Eliezer Ben-Yehuda is remembered as the father of modern Hebrew, although the language never stopped being used for religious and nonreligious purposes.
Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, credited with advancing modern Hebrew, dies of tuberculosis at 64 in Jerusalem. In 1879 he called for a spiritual center in the Land of Israel as the anchor of Jewish nationalism. He and his wife made aliyah in 1881 and spoke only Hebrew at home. He founded the Va’ad ha-Lashon, the forerunner of the Academy of Hebrew Language, and worked on a Hebrew dictionary, which his second wife, Hemda, finished after he died.
Dec. 17, 1993 — Rabbi Urges Soldiers Not to Remove Settlements
Rabbi Shlomo Goren, shown in 1949, served as a military chaplain and qualified as a paratrooper during the War of Independence. He eventually reached the rank of major general in the IDF. Hans Pinn, National Photo Collection of Israel.
Shlomo Goren, the first head of the IDF’s Military Rabbinate and the Ashkenazi chief rabbi from 1973 to 1983, calls in a written statement for soldiers to disobey orders to remove Jewish settlers from the West Bank, Gaza Strip or Golan Heights. An opponent of the Oslo Accords, Goren sees any such order as illegal because it would conflict with the Torah commandment to settle the land promised to the Jewish people.
Dec. 18, 1947 — Trans Pioneer Gila Goldstein Is Born
Gila Goldstein, who in the 1960s is among the first Israelis to have sex reassignment surgery, is born in Turin, Italy. The family immigrates to Israel a few years later, and Goldstein begins identifying as a girl and using the name Gila by 1960. She becomes a dancer, a singer and an actress. She emerges as a leading LGBT activist and in 1975 helps found Aguda, Israel’s first support organization for LGBT youths.
Dec. 19, 1903 — Nordau Survives Assassination Attempt
Max Nordau, who founded the World Zionist Organization with Theodor Herzl, escapes unharmed when two shots are fired at him at close range during a Chanukah party in Paris. The would-be assassin, Russian student Chaim Zelig Luban, 27, is angry at Nordau’s support for the Uganda Plan, which would establish a temporary Jewish homeland in East Africa. Luban is found to be mentally ill and is not prosecuted.
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