Maybe... Or perhaps it's security theater with its own scripts, because they do also seem to think belts and bracelets and even outlet adaptors can bring down airliners, and they paid disproportionate attention to those during our screening.

I'm not a security expert so I don't necessarily want to say any of it was totally useless, but at least some of the procedures in every country I've been through seem like security theater, Israel included, and one can poke fun at, or grumble about, much of it.

BTW, have they in general backed off from the extensive psychological screening they used to do in the past or do they only apply it to selected passengers? For this trip to Israel I really felt the pre-check-in screening was extremely cursory.