Winnie, I once had to leave for what turned out to only be a few months. I did not owe anything on the period when I was abroad. I was billed much later and they tried to impose a late penalty but I argued with the clerk and she cancelled it.
Ben,
1. Serving IS one’s ruchniut.
2. On the contrary, the Zionists offered to send armed men to guard the yeshivot but they refused saying that they had an good relations with the local Arab leaders. The only “provocation” was refusing to sign away the Kotel (both Rav Kook and Rav Sonnenfeld steadfastly refused despite British pressure).
3. The state is the state of all Jews. If you do not think that one Jew has the obligation to protect another if he can then there is a tremendous hole in your chinuch.
4. Rav Ovadia also said that Israel’s wars are milchemot mitzva. He also said that without the IDF there would be no yeshivot.
5. FYI, only 20-22,000 have been killed since 5708. Who is to say what would have happened to them if they had had to stay in Europe and Arab countries? As we say here ,every bullet has an address. Once someone drove wearing a helmet and bullet-proof vest. The bullet struck in the tiny space between them. On the other hand, once Arabs fired over thirty shots at a girl waiting at a hitchhiking station from the other side of the highway. She was only lightly grazed and was released from the hospital the same day.
If not for the state of Israel there would have been mass conversion. Xtian missionaries were using the Holocaust as proof that Hashem rejected us c”v. They even accosted Rav Soloveichik during his travels between Boston and NY. If there had been a state twenty years earlier there would not have been a Holocaust.