I had a phone call the other day from my friend Murray Greenfield, an ex-American who has been living in Israel for so long that he makes me feel — my wife and I settled here in 1970 — like a recent immigrant. In fact, Mr. Greenfield first arrived in Israel before it was Israel, as a sailor on an illegal immigrant ship named Hatikvah. The Hatikvah was apprehended by the British navy as it neared the coast of Palestine in May 1947 and towed into Haifa port, from which its passengers, European Holocaust survivors, were all sent to an internment camp in Cyprus.

The Hatikvah, previously a St. Lawrence River icebreaker named Tradewinds, and before that a Canadian coastguard cutter named Gresham, was one of the ships, many largely manned by American sailors, that took part in what is known in Hebrew as Aliyah Bet, the attempted running of the British blockade on Jewish immigrants to Palestine during, and especially after, the World War Two. A better-known ship, also with a mostly American crew, was the Exodus — and it was due to the commemoration in Tel Aviv this week of the 60th anniversary of the Exodus’ saga that Mr. Greenfield was calling me about.

“Would you believe it?” he asked. “They’re having a big shindig presided over by the mayor of Tel Aviv, with an expected 1,500 to 2,000 of the Exodus’ surviving passengers, and Haganah veterans, and politicians, and speeches, and they haven’t invited a single one of us American boys who sailed the ships, even though some are still alive and in Israel.”

I could believe it. In earlier years, native Israeli pride stood in the way of recognizing the significant role played by a relatively small number of young American Jews, most of them World War II veterans, in manning illegal immigrant ships and in helping to establish Israel’s navy and air force, two military branches in which Palestinian Jews had little experience. In later years, having been downplayed, this role was forgotten. No one was deliberately slighting my friend Mr. Greenfield or his surviving buddies — when he contacted the event’s organizers, they quickly apologized and made amends. They simply have never been part of official Israeli history.

This is not the only thing about Aliyah Bet that has been, if not forgotten, at least seriously distorted. The Exodus is a good example. When it is thought of today, it is imagined by most people in terms of the Leon Uris novel and the Otto Preminger film made from it, which had an enormous impact upon its release in 1957. But the real Exodus was nothing like the ship on which Paul Newman sails into Haifa port with 611 Jewish refugees smuggled out of Cyprus, whom the British are then forced, after a heroic struggle, to open the gates of Palestine to. Its story was both far more heroic and more comic — the Exodus’ adventures in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean before picking up its human cargo on the southern French coast had a decidedly madcap quality — and by the time its passengers reached Palestine, the country was called Israel and the British were gone from it.

In general, if its goal was to bring Jews to Palestine, Aliyah Bet was a dismal failure. Few of its ships ever got close enough to shore to land their passengers; almost all were detected by British surveillance long before they neared the coast and some before they even set sail. Perfectly aware of its destination, the British had already tried to thwart the Exodus’ departure from its home port of Baltimore. Nearly everyone who sailed on them ended up in a Cypriot detention camp.

But bringing significant numbers of Jews to Palestine was never the real purpose of Aliyah Bet, whose planners understood that they were no match for the British navy. The purpose was public relations, or, to use a less pleasant term, propaganda — and in this, Aliyah Bet succeeded brilliantly. Each turned-back boatload of homeless Holocaust survivors, their families murdered by the Nazis, their tragedy-lined faces staring with longing at the land they were not allowed to enter; each doomed and sometimes violent struggle with the British shore police to reach that land, sometimes by jumping into the water; each newspaper photograph of the detainees in Cyprus, looking at the camera through barbed wire as if they had been returned to Auschwitz or Treblinka — every such story and image was another blow struck in world public opinion against the continuation of the British Mandate and for the creation of a Jewish state. Nothing did more to create sympathy for Zionism in those years than the “failure” of Aliyah Bet.

Israel today has forgotten not only the American boys who manned the Wedgewood, the Haganah, the Arlosoroff, the Ben Hecht, the Hatikvah, the Exodus, the Geula, the Jewish State, the Pan York, and the Pan Crescent. It has forgotten the lessons of Aliyah Bet as well. It’s not only the immediate results of what you do or don’t do that matters, it’s also how it looks. Too often despairing of winning the world’s understanding or sympathy, Israelis have developed the attitude that there is no point in fostering their own image or making photogenic gestures, since the world will not appreciate it anyway. They will do what needs to be done and the world can like it or lump it.

This is shooting oneself in the foot. For better or for worse, the world sees images first, what lies behind them only later. An image without a positive truth behind it will sooner or later collapse, but a truth without a positive image may take unaffordably long to register. The boys who sailed the boats got the message across in time.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.