...In the village of Elei Sinai, some residents plan to wear concentration-camp uniforms or yellow stars with the word ''Jude" on the day they are expelled. A Likud Party faction opposed to disengagement calls it ''an order the likes of which were last signed in German." A member of Israel's parliament set off a storm when he said, ''Maybe we killed Eichmann for no reason, because he was also just following orders."

Such Nazi allusions have been sharply condemned. The Anti-Defamation League called them an ''inexcusable perversion of history," and Yad Vashem, Israel's renowned Holocaust research institute, warned that they ''damage the memory of the Shoah." Some of Sharon's allies on the left, oblivious to such niceties as freedom of speech, even proposed making the non-historical use of Holocaust terminology an offense punishable by up to seven years in prison.

Let's be clear: You don't have to support disengagement to agree that the Nazi-talk is grotesque. The Israeli army is not the Gestapo. The peaceful Jewish residents who will be forced from the homes and land they love are not being sent to gas chambers. Sharon's plan may be delusional -- instead of enabling Israelis to ''disengage" from Palestinian violence, it will bring them more of it, and in deadlier forms -- but it isn't the Final Solution.

And yet . . .

And yet there is no getting around the fact that Israel is about to become the first modern, Western nation in more than 60 years to forcibly uproot a whole population -- men, women, children, babies -- solely because they are Jews. There is no getting around the fact that the forthcoming expulsions are rooted in the belief that any future Palestinian state must be Judenrein -- emptied of its Jews. And while it goes without saying that Sharon and every member of his government abominate the Nazis and all they stood for, there is no getting around the fact that disengagement is meant to appease an enemy that has always regarded the genocidal hatred of Jews in a very different light.

Long before there were ''occupied territories," Haj Amin El-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem and the leader of Palestine's Arabs, urged Hitler to ''solve the problem of the Jewish elements in Palestine and other Arab countries . . . by the same method that the question is now being settled in the Axis countries." When five Arab armies invaded the newborn Israel in 1948, the secretary-general of the Arab League vowed to wage ''a war of extermination and a momentous massacre, which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades."...

...The abandonment of Gaza and northern Samaria plays directly into the hands of the haters. The sight of Jewish troops expelling Jewish families from their homes and schools will do nothing to promote Arab-Israeli peace. It will reinforce instead the notion that any Jewish presence is intolerable on land the Arabs claim for themselves. And if that is an argument against Jewish life in Gaza, it is also an argument against Jewish life in Israel.