Air Force, I first learned of this when my old National Guard unit was sending people there. NG has done well enough in all of these deployments that intermixing with active duty deployments has gotten pretty common.
National Guard of the post-9/11 era is very similar to active duty except for getting a lot more personal time and much lower pay while not on deployment. For me it was a pretty decent deal because I could make a far better living in the civilian world than the military would let me have, until the government's crossover influence became concentrated on beating me down in the civilian world too and I was having an inordinate amount of government supervision screwing with my regular income. That's where at a certain point, being in the NG can be the worst of both worlds.
True Zionism is really a matter of interpetation. Those people living in the disputed west bank teritories, often in small settlements and shacks are the true Zionists in my book. Those who decide to not go and support the return to the promised land are in the eyes of a lot of those people, traitors. They traded comfort in the intrigues of foreign capitals for the challenges of repopulating the promised land. The same issue was repeated in the old testament when a lot of Jews were perfectly comfortable in the Babylonian imperial capitol, with their wealth and influence, but would not return to Israel.
Even now, a bunch of conspiracy theories go around Israel about how the world (and Israel) are secretly run by a masonic cult that is not actually Jewish, and the ONLY authentic Zionists are those beleaguered settlers in the West bank, which strongly represents the areas on a map of the shrinkage of old Israel, and currently does not even have full diplomatic recognition from the Israeli central government.
You currently have those people living in besieged enclaves in defiance of the UN, the Palestinians, the central Israeli government, and most NGOs. They are armed, militant, and defiant. The only reason the IDF does not move in on them in serious force is that they have heavily infiltrated the IDF and would readily plunge Israel into a civil war. The Palestinians can't move against them in force (but do skirmish frequently) in part because the settlers have spent years arming up and prepping for resistance. The UN, apart from lacking the balls to move in there in force, knows they would quickly be facing a three to five sided armed conflict if they do.
That's some of the reasons I see those settlements as an organizational and functional model for some forms of survivalist communities here in the US. They live in a hostile environment (really shitty land too), among a hostile government (the Palestinian authority) and a semi-hostile government (the Israeli government) that they must constantly infiltrate, bully, and occasionally bitch smack into supporting their causes, or at least not openly opposing them with force. Not only did their leaders encourage the snuffing of an Israeli prime minister, they constantly lobby for the assassin to get released from prison. Like them or dislike them, you have to recognize the fact they got balls, every last one of them.
The thing to understand is that nobody in that part of the world is a punk. Screwing around in that hornets nest is something that even Obama is smart enough to avoid. My guess is that even if US troops go pretty close to gaza, the actual ROE will include not getting into confrontations with anybody. We are talking about troops being sent to the Sinai, not the more fertile areas (which are kind of crappy but not as crappy). The threat is not to invade Israel or Gaza, but to relocate people to the Sinai in UN/US/Coalition refugee camps with even worse conditions than the areas further north since a lot of those areas have at least been fixed up a bit but the Sinai has not.
