Bart, The security officers in TLV are not especially trained to find the 22 year old palestinian in the croud. They are trained to talk to EVERYONE and identify suspicious people by the way they response. They are more afraid of 25 year old American or British girls that met the 22 year old Palestinian male and took a package from him to deliver to his "brother" abroad. They are more afraid from the ones that carryu a bomb without their knowledge, than the terrorists who will try to board the planes (those will be much easier to find...).
So, when you go to check-in, they will ask you the obvious questions - Did you pack your own bags?, Were your bags with you at all times since you packed them? and more. They will take your passport and ask you for personal details that are written there. They are not doing it to get the obvious answers and move on, they wait to hear what are your responses and how you say it. That's the way to pick up the terrorist or the unknowingly courier. AFAIK, most if not all the boms found by Israeli airport security were found by identifying the person carrying it as suspicious rather than going through every suitcase and treating them equally. This is the way they found a British girl in the 80s trying to carry a suitcase given to her by her Arab-origin boyfriendto carry on a LHR-TLV flight.

This system cannot be implemented in the USA or elsewhere in a high capacity airport, Period!. The reason is the volume of passengers. Even in the new terminal in TLV, some flights get delayed on high volume hours from time to time (especially LY flights as all LY passengers in all flights go through the same security line while the rest of the airlines spread over 4 different security lines). These questions take time and most airports/airlines do not have this luxury of extra emplyees and time. Also, most US airports do not have the extra area for such security checks prior to check-in.