The Yefei Kol is a commentary on the Midrash Shir Hashirim, by Rabbi Shmuel Yaffe Ashkenazi of Constantinople (1525-1595). Commenting on the Three Oaths (chapter 2, verse 7), he writes:
Rashi explains that “going up as a wall” means “together, with a strong hand.” The problem is that if this means a military invasion, there can be no greater rebellion against the nations than this, and it would already be covered by the oath prohibiting rebelling against the nations. So why do we need this oath?
1) Rebelling against a nation means only refusal to obey its laws while living under it, such as paying taxes. But if they are able to leave their jurisdiction, I might have thought that they may do so. For that we have a special oath not to go up as a wall, but rather to wait until we are redeemed by moshiach.*
2) To me it seems possible to say that here we are talking about immigration to Eretz Yisroel even with the permission of the governments. For since Hashem scattered us to the corners of the earth, we have no permission to gather ourselves and to be like a wall, to ascend together to Eretz Yisroel, until Hashem gathers us through moshiach. There is proof to my words from what the Midrash says later on the verse ‘if she is a wall’ (Shir Hashirim 8:9): If Israel had come up as a wall from exile… There it is not talking about going up defiantly [because Cyrus had allowed them to ascend].”
This would explain the continuation of the Midrash, “If so, why will the king moshiach come to gather the scattered of Israel?” In other words, if the Jews go up as a wall from exile, why will moshiach need to come and gather the scattered of Israel? And since we know from many Biblical verses that moshiach will gather the scattered Jews, we have no right to gather ourselves together on our own.
*The difficulty with this first answer is that It assumes that “going up as a wall” is a form of rebellion against the host country under which Jews live in exile. If so, breaking out of one’s country should be a violation of this oath, no matter where the Jew is going – for example, from the Soviet Union to America. But we know that the oath only prohibits going to Eretz Yisroel. The entire page of Gemara in Kesubos is discussing only going to Eretz Yisroel.
Even if one were to argue that the Yefei Kol only meant leaving the host country and going to Eretz Yisroel, how are the Jews going to get Eretz Yisroel if not by force? In that case, they would be rebelling against the country that owns Palestine, such as the Ottoman Turks in Rabbi Shmuel Yaffe’s time. So why wouldn’t this be covered under the oath of “not rebelling”?
Possibly he had in mind a case where the country that owns Palestine is letting the Jews in, so there is no rebellion involved. The only point of rebellion is in leaving the old country, and I would have thought that this kind of rebellion is not so bad and is therefore permitted – if not for the other oath.
Another possibility is that Divine inspiration guided the Yefei Kol to write these words, because although the Ottomans owned Palestine in his time, a time would come (1948) when the land would be up for grabs. There would be no rebellion involved because the Palestinians and Arabs were not previously ruling over the Jews. In this case the oath “not to go up as a wall” prohibits it – not because of Palestine but because of the countries the Jews left.
This would be strange, however. Even when Jews immigrated to Palestine illegally (i.e. the “Mapilim” during the WWII or immediately after it), the illegality was in their arrival in Palestine in violation of the Mandate quotas, not in their departure from Europe. No European country prevented its Jews from leaving, except perhaps Nazi Germany after 1941 when it had already embarked on the mass murder of Jews (in which case it would be allowed to escape anyway because of danger to life). Any scenario where a country didn’t let its Jews leave, and they smuggled themselves out and then came to Palestine to fight the Arabs, is purely imaginary and theoretical.
Furthermore, even if such a case had existed, we are supposing that the Yefei Kol meant that their departure only becomes a sin retroactively after they start a war and take over Eretz Yisroel. How does that make any sense?

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