The Royal Court Theater, one of the most prestigious in London’s West End, will shortly present a play titled “Perdition” which depicts Zionists as willing collaborators with the Nazis in the mass extermination of Hungarian Jews.
The play has already drawn angry protests from British Jews, Holocaust survivors and others as an insidious libel and propaganda windfall for the Soviet Union and anti-Israel hatemongers in Libya and Iran. Scholars of the Holocaust, including Winston Churchill’s biographer, Martin Gilbert, and Dr. Stephen Roth, director of the Institute of Jewish Affairs and himself a member of the Zionist movement in Hungary during World War II, have called the play “preposterous” after reading it in script.
‘VICIOUS TRAVESTY’ LIBEL
According to Gilbert, it is a “vicious travesty of the facts.” Roth branded it “a libel against all those who lived through, fought and mostly perished in the Holocaust.”
The playwright, Jim Allen, a former miner, admits to being an outspoken foe of Israel but claims to be “very pro-Jewish” and that he is “rescuing the Jews from Zionism.”
In an interview published in The Guardian, Allen maintained that the Zionists were “Hitler’s favorite Jews” because their interests coincided with his “on the basis of opportunism.”
Allen’s rationale is that “Hitler wanted the Jews out of Europe and the Jews wanted a state in Palestine. It was almost a volkist (folk) thing, blood and land. Hitler was fond of the Zionists, they were good Jews, prepared to fight for land.”
Ironically, the Royal Court Theater has several wealthy Jews among its patrons and its chief fund-raiser in the U.S. is believed to be the impresario Joseph Papp, a strong supporter of Israel.
Allen’s play is loosely based on events in Hungary in 1944 when the Zionist leader, Rudolf Kastner, engaged in hopeless negotiations with Adolf Eichmann to buy Jewish lives in exchange for trucks and money. Kastner’s activities were the subject of bitter controversy in Israel after the war.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
