Pakistan’s defense minister has made a most incendiary, genocidal, and reckless statement.

Khawaja Asif declared Israel an illegitimate state and “a threat to the entire Muslim world.” He called upon Muslim countries to form “a united military front” against it.

He said this one day after Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey signed the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement, a collective-defense pact that Turkey’s foreign minister compared to Article 5 of NATO.

Asif is the defense minister of a nuclear-armed country.

Every part of that sentence should set off alarms.

This was no criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu, the war in Gaza, settlements, occupation, or any particular Israeli policy. Asif denied the legitimacy of Israel itself. He then called for countries united by religion to organize militarily against it.

That is a genocidal threat.

Israel is home to nearly half the Jews in the world. It cannot be eliminated as a political abstraction. A military campaign capable of destroying Israel would necessarily place millions of Jews at risk of expulsion, subjugation, or death.

Asif did not propose negotiations, territorial compromise, coexistence, or a Palestinian state alongside Israel. He identified Jewish sovereignty as illegitimate and summoned the Muslim world to confront it militarily.

The Genocide Convention defines genocide as acts committed with the intention of destroying, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. When a senior official of a nuclear-armed state calls for a religious military coalition against the world’s only Jewish state while denying........

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