‘Always_Ask_Questions” said: “I am not sure about WZO, but I think Mizrachi early position on cooperating with – mostly anti-religious at the time Zionists – paid off by having Israeli law incorporate some respect for tradition. If early non-religious leaders were on their own, Israel would have sunday for a day off.”
If the early secular Zionists would have been left on their own (without Mizrachi), they would have ended up building a Communist paradise in Uganda, at most… Herzl, even after writing Das Juden Staadt, didn’t even know that the Jews had a historical homeland until some good people told him… The world was very different back then, and most of Klal Yisroel (who were still in Eastern Europe and mostly observant until WWI) would not have bought into a movement of hard-core atheists who had no understanding of their culture or even language, and who would have been kicked out of any Frum venue. The Mizrachi got the secular Zionists ‘in the door’ of Eastern European Jewry in the late 19th and early 20th century, and did the same some decades later with the Sephardi Olim. This directly resulted in the success of Zionism as a movement, and also the loss of most of Klal Yisroel, to Torah observance… This is leaving aside the whole sorry story of the ‘Rabbanut’, which was dominated by Mizrachi from the start. The secularists would not have gotten anywhere with the poshutte Yidden of 130 years ago without the Mizrachi and their crooked/maskilish/apikorsish ‘Ra-banim’.
“Eventually, R Schach and others accepted the reality and gradually joined Israeli politics.”
You seem to be unfamiliar with history, as Rav Shach first became active in public life decades after the State was founded… There were already Chareidi members in the first Knesset, including the Gerer Rebbe’s brother-in-law R’ Itche Meir Levine. The first organized Chareidi counterbalance to Mizrachi was Agudas Yisroel, founded operationally in the early 1920s. The cornerstone of their hashkafa was practical political activism, along with refusal to join the WZO… The WZO was and remains primarily concerned with promoting Zionist values and ideology. Once the state was a practical reality, no-one ‘accepted’ or ‘gradually joined’ anything. Those who opposed any interaction with the Zionists on any level – continue to do so until today. The Agudah immediately joined the Knesset, but not the WZO… which remains their official policy until today… What did gradually change, was that the secular Left no longer believes in Zionism… Today’s Zionists are mostly descendants of Mizrachi…
The so called ‘Status Quo Agreements’ you are probably referring to, were negotiated during the British Mandate, primarily by Agudah (which at the time included Neturei Karta lead by R’ Amram Blau… check it out, it’s true.) The Mizrachi mostly did damage, then and now. BTW, one of the leading Agudah activists at that time was R’ Moshe Blau (the brother of…) who died suddenly under mysterious circumstances in the middle of the negotiations… There were other victims (Chareidi and secular) of Sudden Zionist Death Syndrome, mainly before the State.