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.
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.
All policies are fine as long as they only hurt Arabs and Arab-sympathizers (which are just synonyms for "terrorist").
Thank goodness policies like these never hurt Jews when applied in reverse.
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.
Does that answer your indignation noises?
How you justify racial profiling, only show that you are completely clueless to what it's like being racially profiled ALL the time.
It sounds like you are under the impression that people are being inconvenienced simply out of spite or due to the discretion of some unfriendly TSA-type airport employee - nope. Understandable why you would perceive things as such but the reality is very different, there is quite a lot going on, before you even board the plane, that you don't see. Places where it really matters, like Israel, cannot afford to engage in security theatre, it is all derived by logic.
How it works as is explained in great detail in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y1kJpHBn50
Appeals to emotion mean nothing to me. I get that it feels bad and don't particularly care as being blown up feels worse, promise. If after watching that you have pragmatic improvements to suggest I am all ears. It completely addresses your point, in fact it even explains how this approach probably doesn't scale to larger airports/other-countries.
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.
How to Design Impenetrable Airport Security by Wendover Productions (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y1kJpHBn50, 14 minutes, well researched)
Doesn't appear to have any downsides, appears to be logical, effective, and necessary. Appeals to emotion not withstanding.
If you have any good faith suggestions for improvement after watching this I'd be all ears.