As someone who used to visit the west bank for work I've spent many hours in intimidating interrogation, appropriated laptops, missed flights and most recently 3 days in a horrible prison without access to a shower or fresh clothing, after being denied access to the country for completely nonsense reasons. And the security argument is complete BS most of the time, NGO employees get the same kind of treatment.
The Ben Gurion approach really only works well if the border personnel likes you, A.K.A you're of the right ethnicity, which is not a shining example of how it's done right IMO.
It is a degrees of separation thing. Logically derived and proven to be effective. Very hard to argue with the last part.
I understand how someone who has been inconvienced might perceive it differently but that in and of itself is by design and "priced in" as the goal is not to make 100% of travelers feel good but rather keep 100% of travelers safe.
Understand that none of the counter measures are derived from hypotheticals.
For example, one of the questions asked is "did you pack your own suitcase?"
They aren't going to search your suitcase because of your race. That would be bad. It is bad not because of touchy feely reasons but rather because it isn't optimally effective.
They search based on a far more sophisticated probabilistic threat model based on real world data. All the questions and the way they are asked have logic behind them. It works.
I think unlike the rest of the world, the Israeli's actually know they are actively being targeted. It's not a hypothetical. Politics aside, Palestinians match the Arabian profile and are an active threat. That really sucks if you are completely innocent and ethnically Arab and happen to travel that way of course but it is what it is. They simply are not going to take any chances. It's unfair, probably racist, and it works. And love them or hate them but they have kept a really clean record and that's not for a lack of people trying.
The Israeli's have perfected their airport security over the years and it's a multi layered system of intelligence, profiling, observation via camera's and no doubt lots of high tech. By the time you get to security, they know exactly who they are dealing with. You wouldn't get anywhere near there if that wasn't the case.
And as they've learned the hard way in Israel, security checkpoints can also be active targets. A lot of the gaza and west bank border crossings have been targeted in the past. Basically, any concentration of people is a potential target. So if somebody with a bomb makes it even close to a checkpoint, they've already lost. They need to catch people before that.
The chaotic scenes in European and US airports in the last decades where you regularly have thousands of people piling up in front of security checkpoints, kind of drives home just how low that particular threat actually is. It's a security nightmare. Yet it rarely goes wrong. There was an attack in Brussels airport a few years ago and it was pretty awful but that's one of the few times that actually happened. Otherwise what happens at airports is security theater. It's mostly not actually about security but about plausible deniability when things do go wrong.
Or be a tall, blonde Western European with a suspicious stamp in your passport. They'll question you at length and open your photo camera, film roll or not. The stamp was from Qatar or UAE, can't remember.
I wonder if the US military still provides multiple passports to members deployed in sensitive regions so they can use the passport that is least likely to cause trouble in each airport.
As someone who used to visit the west bank for work I've spent many hours in intimidating interrogation, appropriated laptops, missed flights and most recently 3 days in a horrible prison without access to a shower or fresh clothing, after being denied access to the country for completely nonsense reasons. And the security argument is complete BS most of the time, NGO employees get the same kind of treatment.
The Ben Gurion approach really only works well if the border personnel likes you, A.K.A you're of the right ethnicity, which is not a shining example of how it's done right IMO.