[jillesvangurp]

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.