“Hitler killed five million [sic] Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.....It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany.... As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions.” – Mahatma Gandhi, June 1946, in an interview with his biographer Louis Fischer.
[Source: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/gandhi-on-the-holocaust]
I don’t remember reading or hearing anybody who feels comfortable with this idea. It seems self-defeating and masochistic. Absurd. Cruelly naive.
However, I was reading The Jewish War by Josephus [translated by GA Williams NY: Penguin Books, 1959] and came across an actual successful application of this tactic by the Jews of Ptolemais, later known as Acre:
”When he had secured silence Petronius [legate of Syria 39-42 CE under Caligula] asked; ‘Will you then go to war with Caesar?’ The Jews replied that for Caesar and the people of Rome they sacrificed twice a day. But if he wished to set up the images [of Caesar] in their midst, he must first sacrifice the whole Jewish race: they were ready to offer themselves as victims with their wives and children. This reply filled Petronius with wonder and pity for the unparalleled religious fervour of these brave men and the courage that made them so ready to die. So for the time being they were dismissed with nothing settled.”
Josephus writes that Gaius Caesar [Caligula] died before he could reply to the Jews of Ptolemais, possibly because Publius Petronius, “fearing civil war if the order were carried out, delayed implementing it for nearly a year”; and in a more contemporaneous account from Philo who was part of a delegation to Rome from the Jewish community of Alexandria, King Herod Agrippa, a close friend of Caligula, persuaded Caesar not to punish them possibly by using the argument that Jews had been allowed their sacred space and practice of their religion customarily and it probably wasn’t worth the bother as long as they paid taxes and acknowledged Caesar, even in their prayers.
[Sources: http://www.earlyjewishwritings.com/text/philo/book40.html
https://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/jewish-peasants-block-construction-statue-gaius-caligula-galilee-40-ce]
It was an equivocal victory possible only because the promise of mass suicide slowed the bureaucracy of possible genocide until Caligula died and even more so since the Jewish community in Ptolemais did not survive the Jewish War (66–73 CE).
Yet, the statue was not built, the temple was not defiled, and mass suicide was not required.
Then I came across another example of death as a “nonviolent” tactic:
A specialized form of seppuku in feudal times was known as kanshi (諫死, "remonstration death/death of understanding"), in which a retainer would commit suicide in protest of a lord's decision. The retainer would make one deep, horizontal cut into his abdomen, then quickly bandage the wound. After this, the person would then appear before his lord, give a speech in which he announced the protest of the lord's action, then reveal his mortal wound. This is not to be confused with funshi (憤死, indignation death), which is any suicide made to protest or state dissatisfaction.
[Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seppuku]
There are many other examples of where nonviolent resistance has succeeded against even Nazis. More at https://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2021/07/the-power-of-nonviolence-by-richard.html
Whether this is applicable to the world today is an open and terrible question.
