The Illegals (Meir Levin, 1948), which was produced by
Americans for the Haganah (AFH) is the only film to
provide real-time documentation of these survivors’
attempts to immigrate illegally to Palestine. However,
despite the film’s significance as a unique visual document,
it was not screened when it most mattered, before the
founding of the State of Israel, and over the years has been
marginalized in the Zionist collective memory and in
Zionist research. Based on primary and secondary historical
sources, this article provides the first comprehensive
analysis of the behind- the-scenes story of The Illegals
and its post-production difficulties. It examines the
disagreements, the misunderstandings, and the reasons
why it failed to reach its potential audiences in time, all of
which caused one of the most important documentaries in
the history of Zionism to sink into oblivion.