Mirit Danon is not likely to forget the evening of Nov. 4, 1995. On that fateful autumn day a decade ago, a Jewish religious fanatic gunned down Israel's then-prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin. Danon was his secretary at the time. She also still clearly remembers the weeks leading up to the assassination. It was, after all, her phone that recieved the myriad threatening phone calls made against Rabin. "You son of a bitch!" they would scream into her ear. "Traitor! Death awaits you!"

Now, 10 years later, it seems to Danon that history is repeating itself. She still sits at the same desk just outside of the prime minister's office. This time, however, it is her new boss, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who is the target for the murderous threats. The reason? In the face of fierce opposition from the right, he is planning on removing the Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip this summer. "Sharon is Hitler's partner," reads the graffiti on the sides of buildings in Jerusalem. "Rabin is waiting for you!"

When Sharon showed her some of the most recent threat letters, the normally discrete secretary decided to go public. "We have to get people to wake up," she told the daily paper Maariv. "I have the feeling that I am sitting in the same cinema and watching the same horror film."

Her impression is likely not far from the truth. Since the Israeli cabinet on Feb. 20 officially decided to go ahead with the evacuation of 7,000 settlers from the Gaza Strip and a further 1,000 from the West Bank, the country has been readying itself for what may turn out to be one of the most intense internal struggles since the founding of Israel in the late 1940s. Those supporting Sharon's plan stand eyeball to eyeball with the settlers. Peaceful democrats oppose the religious zealots. Jews are pitted against Jews. The officials in charge of the evacuation are being referred to as the "Judenrat" -- a reference to the Jewish administrators who were forced to work with the government in Nazi Germany to help resettle Jews into ghettos. Additionally, a number of Sharon's ministers have, like Sharon himself, received death threats.

One of Sharon's close associates recently even went so far as to say, "I have the feeling that we are on the eve of a civil war."

Indeed the atmosphere in Israel at the moment makes it seem as though the recent settler demonstrations -- which included burning car tires and fisticuffs with the police -- may just be a foretaste of what is awaiting the Israeli security forces in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank when they begin turning off the electricity, gas and water on July 20.

Preparations are already well underway. Special evacuation units are learning the ins and outs of separating settler mothers from their babies and training is being provided on how, without using overwhelming force, to compel those on sitting strikes to get up. Over 1,000 temporary prison cells for those who refuse to leave are in the works and police are even training for house-to-house combat should the horror scenario of radical settlers barricading themselves inside their houses or synagogues become reality.

Whether or not violence breaks out, July's settlement evacuation promises to be an extremely touchy operation. For the first time since the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel is going to be giving up occupied territory. "The dream of Great Israel is over," says Minister of Housing and Construction Isaac Herzog, a prominent member of Israel's center-left Labor Party. Israel, he says, is beginning to contract down to its final borders.

"For the settlers and the radical right," says Ami Pedatzur, an expert on religious extremists at the National Security Studies Center in Haifa, "this is the moment of truth. They believe that Gaza is the beginning of the end. They believe it is the Last Judgement."

The already precarious predicament is further heated up by fanatical Rabbis who have labelled the removal of settlements as a "Biblical sin" and who have encouraged Israeli soldiers to refuse their orders to aid in the evacuation.

That the "traitor" doesn't this time come from the left side of the political spectrum but from the rightist-nationalist camp is also seen as a slap in the face by the religious fanatics. Ariel Sharon, who, for his entire career, has been seen as uncompromising, as the protector of settlers and as extremely tough on the Palestinian and Arab resistance, is now turning on his own people. Their anger at his about-face appears limitless.

Uri Ariel, 52, a parliamentarian from the right-leaning National Union was a crony of Sharon when the mass building of settlements began in the 1970s. "He asked me for help to strengthen the settlement movement," Ariel says of Sharon. "At that time he saw it has his mission to build settlements in the Gaza Strip and in Judea and Samaria (as Orthodox Jews refer to the West Bank). I thought I knew Sharon. I was mistaken."

"You've never listened to Sharon correctly," Ranan Gissin, the prime minister's spokesman countered. "He has always emphasized that he is concerned, above all, with security. And today the safety and future of Israel demands the withdrawal from some settlements." As far back as 1988, Sharon proposed annexing strategically important settlements while at the same time giving up other parts of the occupied territories in exchange for them.

But Sharon's old friends no longer understand the world. "He's gone crazy," Meir Har-Zion publicly declared. The former elite soldier served on the notorious "101" commando force, which avenged acts of Arab terror. Har-Zion castigates the withdrawal plan as the new "Shoa," the Hebrew term for the Nazi's systematic murder of the Jews.

And he's not the only one.

Paradoxically, Sharon, until now an icon of the nationalists, is winning the hearts of Israel's leftists. While some settlers accuse him of wanting to make some of the Promised Land "Jew free," some commentators are describing the notorious "falcon" as a "peace-maker." And in public opinion polls, he's more popular than ever before. Labor Party ministers praise his "historic courage." And his most loyal party in the Knesset is the leftist Yahad Party.

But within his own party, resistance is brewing. The conservative Likud rebels who are opposing the withdrawal -- the most prominent among them is Sharon's rival and former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu -- are demanding a referendum on the issue. Between 30 and 40 Likud parliamentarians have already signed a corresponding petition. "Sharon was elected on the opposite mandate -- that the settlements in Gaza Strip are just as important as Tel Aviv," criticized rebel leader Uzi Landau.

But few believe they actually have a chance of holding a referendum on the settlement evacuations. The last hope for Sharon's opponents is the upcoming vote on the Israeli budget, which is expected to happen by the end of March at the latest. If the prime minister is unable to secure a majority, his government will fall.

Meanwhile, the settlers -- like the government -- are preparing for the worst. One group operating under the name "Last Judgement" has created a paramilitary organization under the command of a retired Israeli military general that even has its own war staff. As many as 100,000 supporters are said to be ready to fight on behalf of the threatened Gaza settlers -- they say they will use their bodies to block the police from coming.

"We're going to call for civil disobedience, but we're against violence," said settler leader Pinchas Wallerstein. But can the resistance remain free of violence? In the Gaza Strip alone, around 3,000 settlers possess weapons.

But the greatest danger is less likely to come from the settlers -- the majority of whom are assumed to be peaceful citizens -- than from right-wing extremists. A fanatical loner is the nightmare of the Israeli intelligence services. "The next killer lives among us," warned the tabloid Maariv. "He doesn't attract attention, he speaks in moderate tones, he's anonymous, silent and deadly. He's just waiting for the right moment and it will come soon."

Known extremists like the leaders of the banned Kach movement -- Noam Federman, Baruch Marzel and Itamar Ben-Gvir -- have already been under observation for some time now. "We will hunt Sharon and anyone who supports the withdrawal," Ben-Gvir has threatened.