Sharon, now prime minister, says he has similar plans for the Gaza Strip (news - web sites).
However, the removal of 7,500 Gaza settlers, among them hundreds of Sinai evacuees, is expected to be much tougher than the evacuation two decades ago — the last time Israel targeted veteran settlements.
Many of the Israelis in Gaza are devout and invoke the Bible to justify their claim to the crowded strip that is home to 1.3 million Palestinians. A third generation of Israelis is growing up in Gaza.
In contrast, the Sinai settlements were barely a decade old when they were taken down. Most of the settlers there were secular, having moved to the peninsula, which Israel captured from Egypt in the 1967 Mideast war, for adventure and quality of life.
Gaza settler leaders say they will exert all possible political pressure and use civil disobedience tactics to prevent evacuation — seen by hawks as a dangerous precedent for a pullback in the West Bank, which has some 230,000 settlers.
Settler leaders say that despite the high stakes, they will not resort to violence. However, some Gaza residents, including those facing uprooting for a second time, say they can't make such a promise.
Analysts say the settlers' ability to mobilize protesters has made it difficult to take down even small West Bank settlement outposts consisting of a few families and trailers.
"Settler opposition — political and physical — is the single greatest obstacle any government will have to overcome," wrote analyst Yossi Alpher, a former Israeli Defense Ministry official.
Sharon said earlier this month that if there is no progress on the U.S.-backed "road map" peace plan, he will remove up to 17 of 21 settlements in the coastal Gaza Strip as part of a unilateral "disengagement" from the Palestinians.
The road map envisions the establishment of a Palestinian state by next year, with the terms to be negotiated by Israel and the Palestinians. The fate of Jewish settlements would be determined in such talks.
It remains unclear whether Sharon will go ahead with the idea. U.S. officials have expressed reservations about such measures, which they fear could doom negotiations between the two sides.
Sharon also might get spooked by opposition from ultranationalist coalition partners who could topple his government.
Tova Friedman, 68, who lives in Gaza's Neve Dekalim settlement, said she still trembles when she thinks of her home in the Sinai town of Yamit which was demolished in 1982 as part of a peace deal with Egypt.
Army bulldozers tore down the homes and soldiers packed the suitcases of residents unwilling to leave. Nearly 5,000 residents and many more sympathizers were dragged off roofs and bundled onto buses.
"I stood next to the bulldozer as they destroyed my house. The bulldozer driver shouted at me 'Lady, do you want me to lift you with the house?'" said Friedman, a mother of four. "I cried and I cried."
Yair Sheleg, who did research on the Yamit evacuation and the Jewish settlement movement, said a replay in Gaza could end in violence.
Fanatics could open fire on soldiers or carry out "terrorist attacks" against Palestinians to thwart evacuation, Sheleg wrote in a report for the Israel Democracy Institute on dismantling settlements.
Some settler rabbis also have challenged the government's right to carry out the evacuations, saying such orders would be illegal and that soldiers should refuse them.
Sinai settlers received generous compensation, from $200,000 to $500,000 per family. About 100 families moved from the Sinai to Gaza.
Yamit settler Avi Ozana, 53, moved to the Gaza community of Elei Sinai and named a daughter after the town he left behind. For Ozana, the pain of evacuation was doubled by the fact that his brother, Rafi, was one of the soldiers ordered to destroy his home.
Yigal Kirshenzaft, 44, was forcibly removed from the Sinai Desert nine times in the early 1980s. Every week, soldiers dragged him to a bus that drove him to an Israeli lockup from which he was released days later.
Three months after the Sinai evacuation, Kirshenzaft and his new wife became the first family in Neve Dekalim in southern Gaza.
They lived in a trailer park without electricity or plumbing and shopped in the nearby Palestinian refugee camp of Khan Younis.
The Kirschenzafts had their original prefab home shipped over from Yamit, expanded it and still live in it today, with their 12 children.
"We will never leave here alive and well ... we will fight with all the tools available to us," he said.
"In principle, I don't want to use violence against soldiers, because they are my brothers, but I don't know what I will do if I am removed from my home of 25 years," Kirshenzaft added.
