Right, great question – the challenge of the eigel was to see if klal yisroel would follow Hashem, or believe in Moshe rabbeinu independently of Him, explains the meshech chochma. Moshe was only an emissary of Hashem, with no independent powers of his own.
The challenge of the success of the zionists is more fundamental – will we believe in the false promises of nationalism, the avodah zara of adding European zeitgeist ideology into judaism, the acceptance of the secular jewish identity as valid, the claims that the gedolim were wrong about making aliyah and that the zionists were right, the claims that we should be militant and not behave like jews have for thousands of years in galus….the list goes on.
And unfortunately, those who legitimatize the state and believe in the “miracles” being a stamp of approval from shomayim continuously fail in all or most of these challenges. Not to mention that their frumkeit suffers in general from their influence from the zionist culture which they refuse to disavow and rebuke, in their worldview that such rebuke is sinas chinom.
Granted, the rabbonim who espoused such beliefs did not end up like that – they were yereim veshlaimim, and some were tzadikim way, way above our understanding, including the ponevezher rov zy”a, but as time went on, those opinions were not kept by the next generation of gedolim. After the dust cleared and the truth became clearer, we aren’t presented with the same challenges of Holocaust survivors who suddenly had a reprieve from years of torture at the hands of non jewish oppressors. We have our own nisyonos which the previous generations would have laughed at, such as technology.
But those who are mamshich darcham of such figures as the ponevezher rov do not refrain anymore from reciting tachanun on 5 iyyar. And there’s a good reason for that.