Funding the state of Israel has been more contentious lately because of the influence of the BDS movement. The premise of the BDS movement is that Israel has been stealing land, which is totally false. It ignores the facts and history.

First, it's ignored that Jews have lived in what is now Israel for 3000 years, and they've lived there continuously. Going back to Abraham and then hundreds of years later when Joshua led the Hebrews to the Promised Land, Jews have lived there. They formed the Kingdom of Israel, which then split into Judah and Israel, then lived there under the occupation of the Assyrians, Babylonians, Syrians, Greeks and Romans. Even after the destruction of Masada in 73, they continued to live there. When the first Crusaders arrived in Jerusalem, they killed a lot of the Jews who lived there. When the Ottoman Turks ruled over that area in the 1800s, they took regular censuses and counted thousands of Jews. Yet a lot of BDS supporters believe that the Jews only started moving in with the Zionist movement in the late 1800s.

They also are ignorant of the fact that the British occupied the area from 1917 as the Turks were losing in World War I. The British and the French took a lot of territory from the Turks and chose to do with it as they wished, which is what happens in wars. After all, it wasn't originally Turkish territory anyway. The British established a mandate from the Jews in Palestine. As more Jews moved in they paid for and bought land from Muslim landowners. Other Muslims threatened the sellers with death, and several times those threats were carried out.

Eventually the British capitulated to Muslim Arab demands and divided the land in a piecemeal fashion that pleased nobody. Transjordan was considered the state for Muslim Palestinians, but that wasn't enough and they wanted the Jews out. In 1948, Israel became an official country and immediately all of its Muslim neighbors attacked it. Palestinian leaders had told their people to leave with expectation that they were going to win, but that didn't work out so well. In the meantime, Muslim Middle Eastern countries expelled several hundred thousand Jews. If Israel didn't take them in they would have been killed.
In the 1967 war, Israel's neighbors again attacked and lost, and Israel captured territory. In 1973 they attacked again and lost.

Meanwhile, Anwar Sadat of Egypt decided he'd have enough fighting and made a serious deal for peace, and Israel returned the Sinai. It was a good deal for Egypt, but Sadat was assassinated for what he did.

Over and over again Israel has sought peace and various Palestinian groups went through the motions. Yasser Arafat, the Egyptian-born head of the PLO, never closed any peace deals because his goal was to not have an Israel. Although the PLO includes Christians, it is dominated by Left-wing Arab Muslims that includes a contingent who want to implement Sharia. Arafat, meanwhile, stole millions of dollars meant to help the poor. The PLO did recognize Israel's right to exist and in turn gave the PLO recognition as a non-terrorist group, although it was responsible for several massacres and mass murders. It renounced violence and operates as the authority in the West Bank.

In Gaza, however, the Palestinians voted in Hamas, a Muslim Brotherhood terrorist group that has in its charter the annihilation of Israel. The Gazans don't want a two-state solution. They want one state. Jews are to be killed, converted, or to live as second-class citizens who pay a monthly mafia tax.

Compare that to Muslims living in Israel. They can and do serve in the military and in parliament. They have full rights. Those Arab Muslims who support Israel for the freedom they experience are called traitors and apostates by the anti-Israel Muslims. In orthodox Islam, the penalty for being an apostate is death.

So why support Israel? One reason is that its supporters don't want to see the genocide of 8 1/2 million Israelis. Another is that it's a reliable democratic republic that has always supported the United States and Britain. So it serves as a line of defense against jihadist groups that want to spread Islam by the sword for the ultimate goal of a one-world caliphate.

After considering all that, to me Benjamin Netanyahu has a good point.