No, he wasn't saying that "we should have pointlessly thrown away" any of them. He was saying that the Jews should have sacrificed themselves to make a point, in something like the same way as many of Gandhi's followers put themselves in danger to make a point, and Gandhi himself went on (life-threatening) hunger strike to make a point. And he was saying that the end result would likely have been the loss of fewer Jewish lives.
There is a big difference between "It would be a noble and also an effective thing for group X to sacrifice themselves" and "Other people should sacrifice group X", and it seems very clear that Gandhi was saying the first of those and not the second, and that he was advocating that they should do the same kind of thing as he did himself.
Now, for the avoidance of doubt, I think (1) he was wrong about this and (2) there's still something a bit indecent about saying "those people should have sacrificed themselves". But I don't see anything anti-Semitic, or anti-humanistic, in this, nor do I think he was saying that Jewish lives were worth little in absolute terms or relative to others. He was saying that in the face of a powerful oppressor self-sacrifice is both an effective tool and a noble thing to do.
Ah. The dispute here is that I (along with most Jews nowadays) simply do not believe that self-sacrifice is effective or noble. The Holocaust was, in fact, our single biggest lesson ever in precisely that. From our perspective, self-sacrifice is anti-humanistic, it's a simple murder: you kill yourself, save nobody else, and win nothing for it but the sympathy of future generations -- hopefully.
I mean, for that matter, compare how many Holocaust victims did fight back versus those who didn't. Since the vast majority didn't fight back, what could they have done to make their deaths into an effective "martyrdom"?
Thank you for this lucid explanation. Gandhi's way of thinking and acting remains extremely counterintuitive (to us), so it's important to remember both that he practiced what he preached and that it actually worked. If one forgets either of those things, many of his statements become obvious monstrosities. But the fault is with our definition of "obvious".
There is a big difference between "It would be a noble and also an effective thing for group X to sacrifice themselves" and "Other people should sacrifice group X", and it seems very clear that Gandhi was saying the first of those and not the second, and that he was advocating that they should do the same kind of thing as he did himself.
Now, for the avoidance of doubt, I think (1) he was wrong about this and (2) there's still something a bit indecent about saying "those people should have sacrificed themselves". But I don't see anything anti-Semitic, or anti-humanistic, in this, nor do I think he was saying that Jewish lives were worth little in absolute terms or relative to others. He was saying that in the face of a powerful oppressor self-sacrifice is both an effective tool and a noble thing to do.