Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey announced a trilateral defence pact on Friday. Turkey's foreign minister Hakan Fidan described it as technically equivalent to Article 5 of the NATO treaty, meaning an attack on one member is treated as an attack on all three. It sets up a ministerial committee and a general secretariat based in Saudi Arabia, and leaves the level of support in any given case to consultation. Egypt may join once technical questions are settled.
A day later Pakistan's defence minister Khawaja Asif told an interviewer that Israel is a threat to the entire Muslim world, that all Muslim countries must unite in that context, and that Israel is a product of the Balfour Declaration and was established as an illegitimate state. He added that the differences between Israeli leaders are only marginal, and that opposition would continue whatever an election produced.
The pact itself does not name Israel. Its text conditions any obligation on an attack against a member, and on that reading it is aimed at nobody in particular. A cabinet minister of one signatory naming a country the next day is what gives the language its temperature, and it is the part that will be read in Jerusalem.
The background is unchanged and specific. Pakistan is nuclear armed, has no relations with Israel, voted against its establishment in 1947 and has withheld recognition pending Palestinian statehood on the lines that preceded 1967. Asif has used harsher language before, calling Israel a cancerous state, which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called outrageous at the time. There was no immediate Israeli response to these remarks, and none from Riyadh or Ankara either.