“Chovevei Tzion pre-dates Herzl and the secular zionist movement.”
I was going to say this but you beat me too it. The 19th century Jewish settlers in Eretz Yisrael were mostly religious.
And has others have pointed out, Herzl wasn’t particularly anti-religious, and he really does meet the definition of tinok shenishba. He had no problem when gedolim like Rav Reines and Rav Kook supported Zionism — the hostility toward Torah would come from later Zionists.
“i doubt anyone else on this site is understanding zionism that way. it generally refers to a herzl-esque emancipation from all things jewish”
No, it doesn’t. Among others, Rav Reines, Rav Kook, Rav Herzog, and Rav Soloveitchik would have stridently disagreed with you!
“why dont you guys disassociate?”
You woudn’t notice if we did.
In fact, we did disassociate and the fact you made that comment means you didn’t notice. In the election for the first Knesset, all the religious groups — dati and charedi — ran on one list. (It got 12% of the vote, 16 MKs. Ben Gurion included the religious in the government even though he could have formed a government with majority Knesset support from only the two socialist parties. So much for Ben Gurion being completely anti-religious.) In every Knesset election since, there has been one or more dati leumi parties that have run identified candidates not a part of other parties. The dati program is of course quite a bit different than the charedi program; dati rabbis have never been much into religious coercion for example. Unfortunately the DL movement — against the position of some of the greatest DL rabbis of the time — went “all in” on settlements at the expense of torah education and the movement has never recovered. Rov Soloveitchik z’tz’l in particular was very upset about this towards the end of his life.