About a year after being elected to the Knesset on the Zionist Camp list in March 2015, the popular sports announcer Zuhair Bahloul discovered that in the game of politics, there are many rivals and that someone who doesn’t play by the rules could find himself an outcast, even in his own party.

In an April 4 interview with radio station Darom, Bahloul refused to use the word “terrorist” in reference to the Palestinian assailant executed March 24 in Hebron by an Israeli soldier while lying neutralized on the ground after stabbing another soldier. In an interview with Army Radio on April 7, Bahloul tried to explain why he thinks that not every Palestinian assailant is a terrorist, stating, “Obviously, if he [the Palestinian] killed someone, then he is a murderer, but if we keep going back to the same terminology, how will we ever make peace? How will we instill peace between the Palestinians and us? Israelis believe that anyone who fights for his freedom and independence is a terrorist … [but] he is not a terrorist.”

Bahloul called the assailants “murderers,” and said they should be punished, but his refusal to call them “terrorists” led to accusations across wide swathes of Israeli society that he himself supported terrorism. One of the first to go on the attack against him was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who described his remarks as “disgraceful.” That said, journalist Ronen Bergman of Yedioth Ahronoth checked and reported on April 11 that in his 1987 book “Terrorism: How the West Can Win,” ​Netanyahu distinguishes between terrorists, who attack civilians, and guerrillas, who attack military targets to achieve political aims. In the chapter “The Definition of Terrorism,” Netanyahu wrote that guerrilla fighters are the exact opposite of terrorists. He claimed that unlike guerrilla fighters, who go to battle against military forces, which in most cases are much stronger than they are, terrorists choose to attack civilians who are defenseless and weak.

Even members of Bahloul’s own party didn’t go easy on him. “The party's position stipulates that a terrorist is a terrorist is a terrorist. It does not matter if he sets out to kill Arabs or Jews,” said Zionist Camp Chairman Isaac Herzog, to clarify the party’s position. Other Knesset members from his party also condemned Bahloul, who thus found himself under attack from the left and the right. Zionist Camp Knesset member Eitan Cabel went so far as to say that Bahloul could no longer be a member of the party.