Perdition (play)

Perdition is a 1987 stage play by Jim Allen. Its premiere at the Royal Court Theatre Upsairs in London was abandoned, after protests, because of the controversial and tendentious claims it contains.

Influenced by activist Lenni Brenner's book Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (1983), Allen described Brenner's book as "a goldmine source".Perdition, according to Allen in an interview for Time Out at the time of the intended original production as “the most lethal attack on Zionism ever written, because it touches the heart of the most abiding myth of modern history, the Holocaust. Because it says quite plainly that privileged Jewish leaders collaborated in the extermination of their own kind in order to help bring about a Zionist state, Israel, a state which is itself racist". According to him, during the Holocaust "the lower you went down on the social scale, the more you found resistance; but the higher you went up the social scale, the more you found cooperation and collaboration [with Nazis]".

The play deals with a libel action in Israel a few years after the Second World War, which concerned alleged collaboration during the war between the leadership of the Zionist movement in Hungary and the Nazis, assertions which are viewed by mainstream commentators as being a Stalinist slur.

Its starting point comes from the trial of Rudolf Kastner, a leading member of the Budapest Aid and rescue committee whose job it was to help Jews escape from the clutches of the Nazis in Hungary. His libel trial in Israel was about an accusation that he had collaborated with Adolf Eichmann, one of the main SS officers in charge of carrying out the Holocaust. Though the initial trial found that he had indeed "sold his soul to the devil" by saving certain Jews whilst failing to warn others that their "resettlement" was in fact deportation to the gas chambers, there was a subsequent Israeli supreme court trial a few years later at which the findings were overturned.

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