Betraying his party's history

It's possible that sports broadcaster-turned-Zionist Union MK Zouheir Bahloul is not, to say the least, a wise man. His insistence on avoiding making a very obvious statement, that a Palestinian who charges at an IDF soldier with a knife is a terrorist, shows that he does not understand the concept of political correctness.

You cannot join the Knesset as a representative of a party whose forefathers of defense include David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Dayan, Yigal Allon and Yitzhak Rabin, and then respond with indifference to an attack on an IDF soldier who was on duty. This would be a really bad scenario. But there is still one that is worse.

It's possible that Bahloul is a cunning political tactician, and his political correctness indicator is telling him that the few members of the Arab community who support the Zionist Union refuse to see the murderer from Hebron's Tel Rumeida neighborhood as a terrorist. If that's true, Bahloul understands deep down that the Palestinian from Tel Rumeida was a terrorist, but he doesn't dare say so.

This scenario is several times more serious, and goes beyond a single legislator rebelling against his party line to address the assumption that there is no one who can better repair the rift in society than the moderate Arabs who vote for the Zionist Union.

When considering these two options, we must pay attention to the responses issued by the party. Zionist Union Chairman Isaac Herzog opposed the comments, of course, as did MKs Itzik Shmuli and Revital Swid, but there were pockets of silence among different branches of the party, and that is also cause for concern.

It would be possible to understand Bahloul's stance if he had been met with insensitivity, opacity and inflexibility on the part of the Defense Ministry. But Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon is leading the struggle for behavioral norms against many of his colleagues in the Likud and in Habayit Hayehudi, who are near to granting full justification to the soldier who shot the terrorist-murderer while he was lying on the ground. This is a life or death struggle for the image of the IDF, the restraint required by the rule of law and for public norms among the Israeli political parties. On Thursday, Bahloul did harm to the sane group that is struggling with its back against wall against the "thugs," as Ya'alon has called them.

In every Knesset, there are members who are the exception to the rule. In the distant past, some of them contributed to raising the standards for election. Apparently not in the 20th Knesset.

Likud MK Oren Hazan, Habayit Hayehudi MK Bezalel Smotrich and now Bahloul -- three MKs from three different parties who have been at the center of controversies -- have put the balance of the national debate on shaky ground.