there may be no place that is ever actually 100% "safe" - but some places are much safer than others.
Agreed. But we fear the things we don't know. As I brought up in another thread, people in the Midwest fear CA b/c of earthquakes but they just happen to "live with" tornadoes. People in CA fear the Midwest b/c of tornadoes but they "live with" the earthquake threat.
People who went to that country concert in Vegas thought it was safe. People who were going to work at their jobs in the WTC towers on 9/11 thought it was safe. Students who went to Columbine HS that day in the 90s, and the parents that sent them, thought it was safe.
I live in south Orange County which is "safe", but there are areas of OC that I wouldn't go at night. And then there was the time in the middle of the night that a crazy naked drunk (or drugged?) guy was going door to door and ended up on my front porch before the cops found him, in a nice quiet "safe" neighborhood--how many ways could that have ended badly?
But yet everyone's scared of Israel. As I said, absent active hostilities, I wouldn't worry about it. If I'm going for a week, the odds of a terror attack happening when I'm there are already slim. The odds of it happening anywhere near where I am, given the size of the country, are slimmer. The odds of it happening locally enough to me that I might be affected are even slimmer. And even if it happens within, say, 1/2 mi of where I am, the odds that I'll be injured are killed are even slimmer than that.
The big difference between Israel and someplace like Jordan or Egypt is that I know that in Israel I have virtually nothing to fear as a white American from the Israelis. In someplace like Jordan or Egypt I'd have something to fear from the locals, which is why CD ended up on a group tour on a bus rather than just strolling around the streets by himself.