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The Illegals: a unique but overlooked historical documentation of illegal immigration

ABSTRACT 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.