Israel is basically a european\american sattelite in that region that has a potential to ease the involvement if something there goes in a conflict to their interests first or some global massacre second, but what we see with Bibi is that he leveraged the position of this country to the point they can dictate others to support them, and although they don't need money for their little genocide, they ping other countries for them to show loyalty. I don't think it costs that much for an individual like you since MIC by default costs trillion+ of dollars annually, but that's a different topic.

What matters is that unlike ukrainians, jewish people after WW2 spread across the whole world and there are a lot of citizens with an israili citizenship in both the West and the ex-SocBlock. That makes everything invloving Israel relevant globally. There is still a problem of hatred towards jewish people, and they succeeded at calling it out unlike romanians or any other genocided minority. Thus, it succeedes at making it everyone's problem and not a local one, like many hot conflicts going on, when it mixes up historical genocide with every conflict they get involved in.

They intentionally make it hard to distance from them. While it does have a potential value for other states, to bring down something like HAMAS or Al-Kaida for example (if they can do that at all), it got too comfy with that sentiment going on. And for a taxpayer in the US I'd probably question not why they are funded at all, but why they hold other countries as pawns and openly show how they don't give a fuck about their reputation and international law because they'd get funded anyway. From the funder's perspective, they are leeches ignoring the agreement and testing how long they can go with it. And tolerating that only enables such behavior.