Nazi echoes in the Gaza 'disengagement?' A grotesque comparison, and yet...

Jeff Jacoby is correct when he writes

"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 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."

More than half a century later, how much has changed?