Talk:HaLevanon

The lead and geographic descriptors

Hey Totalstgamer, I saw your edit Diff/1366992502 and I think that both you and the previous editors have identified an inaccuracy here, but just not found the optimal solution.

The first sentence should, according to MOS:LEADSENTENCE, introduce the topic in plain English and tell a nonspecialist reader what, when and where. Our own article on the land of Israel makes it clear that this is a traditional Jewish name for what is now known as Israel and that it is a "concept" that was evoked by the founders of the modern state of Israel, so it is not a geographic descriptor. Correct me if I am wrong here, this geographical area would have been called Ottoman Palestine during the 1863–1886 years that this newspaper was published, so I believe the first sentence of the lead would more correctly summarise the article with either:

1. −

   was the first Hebrew-language newspaper to be published in [[the Land of Israel]].

   +

   was the first Hebrew-language newspaper to be published in [[Ottoman Palestine]].

2. −

   was the first Hebrew-language newspaper to be published in [[the Land of Israel]].

   +

   was a Hebrew-language newspaper that was published in [[Jerusalem]], then in [[Ottoman Palestine]], between 1863 and 1886.

If the connected to "land of Israel" should be mentioned, that should happen somewhere else in the article and be supported by a source. The sentence in the lead that supports is currently sourced, to a book Geschichte Palästinas by Gudrun Krämer, but I don't have access to this book so I can't check if it supports this or if including it in the lead is UNDUE. The article on the successor newspaper Havatzelet does not mention "land of Israel" either, so I'm not sure that it should be included here either.

I'm a little bit iffy about the achieved significance as the first newspaper published in the Land of Israel, an area of significance in Jewish religious thought and discourse part (which you removed), because that was unsourced and there are no other claims about the significance of either the newspaper or the area elsewhere in the article, and so that was not supported by any sources. My guess is that was just added by the TA in Diff/1353811926 as a compromise to keep the wikilink to the state of Israel article but changing the first sentence to state a geographic location. ‑‑gurkubondinn 12:48, 11 August 2026 (UTC)