Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar slammed his Turkish counterpart for his comment that Israel had become “an unbearable burden on humanity,” characterizing it as “a clear call to genocide.”

Last week, Turkey’s Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said that Israel seeks a new enemy in order to rehabilitate its image in the world’s eyes. He failed to name this new enemy or to explain how fighting a new enemy is supposed to help Israel’s image.

He concluded his strange remarks by saying that “Everyone knows it. Everyone feels it. They whisper about it behind closed doors, and from time to time they even speak about it openly. But this is humanity’s shared problem. I mean, this needs to be named for what it is. These people have become a burden that humanity can no longer bear, with these policies and this mindset. Humanity cannot bear this.”

Sa’ar responded immediately, posting on X a statement condemning Fidan’s words as a “textbook incitement to genocide.”

“Dehumanizing the Jewish people as an ‘unbearable burden’ is the classic, horrific language of history’s worst eliminationist regimes,” he said, urgently calling on the “civilized world and Turkey’s NATO allies” to “unequivocally condemn this explicit call for the erasure of Israel.”

Standing alongside Rwandan Foreign Minister Olivier Nduhungirehe Monday, Sa’ar again addressed Fidan’s inflammatory rhetoric.

“Speaking about genocide, I must address the appalling remarks made a few days ago by Turkey’s Foreign Minister, the Foreign Minister of the country that will host tomorrow the NATO summit,” Sa’ar said. He quoted his Turkish counterpart as saying, “These people have become a burden that humanity can no longer bear,” then added, “This is a sentence that sounds very familiar to sentences from about 100 years ago to speak about a people as a problem for humanity.”

“What do you do with a burden that you can no longer bear?” he demanded, warning that these words “are a clear call for genocide.”

“The Jewish people know very well what happens when such words are allowed to go unchallenged,” he said. “The first step to genocide is dehumanization. This is the first step.”