The editor of a jounal asked me to withdraw the ArXiv version of a paper and only upload it after acceptance. Is it possible to do that? I submitted a paper to Elsevier recently. The editor told me that its similarity tool found more than 80% of word coincidence and sent me the report. I realized that the test actually referred to the same paper, specifically the version posted in Arxiv. I thought this was very odd because the Elsevier recommends uploading the manuscript by retrieving the sources directly from Arxiv, which is what I did. After explaining to the editor what happened, he asked me to withdraw the paper from Arxiv and only submit it again after acceptance.

I would like to know if it is possible to upload a new version of the paper on Arxiv after having withdrawn it. Has anyone ever had a similar situation before?
I totally agree with the comments of @anyon and @david-ketcheson. I'd suggest that you 


point the editor to the guidelines regarding self-archiving of the journal and/or Elsevier in general and, if this fails, 
contact your library, because there are people dealing with this kind of situations very often and they usually have (other) contact persons/options at the publisher.