“It’s really happening! Today we make history. It’s just as we promised. Exactly one week from today, LGBTQ people will have equal access to surrogate parenthood in Israel.” In what can only be described as a surprising tweet, Minister of Health Nitzan Horowitz announced Jan. 4 that the long legal and political saga involving Israel’s LGBTQ community had reached a happy conclusion.

At the heart of the struggle was the justifiable demand that same-sex couples be allowed to have children through surrogates. For years, human rights and gay groups have argued that Israeli law discriminates against them by reserving surrogacy for straight couples. This right was opposed by the ultra-Orthodox parties, which were part of almost every government in the last two decades. They blocked any and every attempt to change or overturn that discriminatory law. Now that the government has succeeded in doing this, Israel’s health system has become one of the most progressive in the world, when it comes to the LGBTQ community.

Leading this historic measure was Horowitz, an out gay man himself. His party Meretz, which he leads, has long been identified with the struggle for gay rights and is said to represent the community in the Knesset.

When the new government was formed, just over half a year ago, one of the first things that Horowitz did as the new minister of health was to see how he might be able to use his ministerial powers to advance measures beneficial to the LGBTQ community. On Aug. 19, he overturned the ban on receiving blood infusions from gay people, which had been in effect since the 1980s, in response to the AIDS epidemic. Despite the criticism it received over the years, and despite several lawsuits against it, the ban was never overturned.