THE NEW MOVIE The Reader is a powerful drama about a young man who discovers that a woman from his past served as a prison guard at Auschwitz. The most disturbing revelation was that she had refused to unlock the doors of a burning church where 300 Jews had taken refuge for the night. Despite their screams and pleas, all those inside perished.

At this moment, Israel is doing something very similar to the people of Gaza. Locked in the largest open-air prison in the world, denied adequate food and water, the 1.4 million inhabitants of the tiny walled enclave are being bombed by F-16s and Apache helicopters with no place to escape. The inhumanity of this massive war crime is beyond description. More than 2,500 Gazans — men, women and children, Christian and Muslim — were killed or injured in the first week, and our taxes are helping to pay for this.

While American families are struggling economically and losing their houses, Congress has just approved another $30 billion in military aid to Israel. In the West Bank, Israel has been using this money to destroy Palestinian homes, build segregated roads and towns on stolen land, and kill or arrest those who resist. The settlement population is growing three times as fast as the population inside Israel. Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni has confirmed that non-Jewish Israeli citizens will be urged to relocate to the isolated, walled reservations dubbed a “Palestinian state.”

In Gaza, our money has been directed toward overthrowing the democratically elected Hamas government. One does not need to endorse Hamas to know the U.S. encouraged those elections, which were closely monitored by the international community. Palestinians rejected the corrupt government of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, which had brought no relief from their suffering under occupation, and voted for change.

Last year the United States trained Fatah troops, which were sent into Gaza to counter the legitimate government of Hamas. We then helped send truckloads of weapons to Fatah members in Gaza to help them mount a coup. Hamas repelled that attempt in violent clashes and remained in power. Yet Abbas proclaimed that Hamas had staged a “bloody coup” and this was so widely reported that few remember the facts.

Frustrated by their failed coup, Israel and the United States — with Abbas’s blessing — have sought to make conditions in Gaza so impossible for civilians that they will overthrow Hamas and run gratefully into the arms of the party defeated in the election.

Power has been cut off, vital foods and medicines have been turned away at the border, most water is undrinkable, and sewage tanks are overflowing because the parts needed to fix them are among urgently needed supplies Israel will not allow into the Gaza Strip. This extended siege blatantly violated the terms of Israel’s cease-fire with Hamas and international law, as did occasional non-lethal rockets fired into fields by rogue groups.

On Nov. 4, during U.S. elections, Israel directly broke the cease-fire by invading Gaza and launching deadly air strikes, citing tunnels that could be used to attack soldiers. Six Palestinians were killed. No alternate means of exposing the tunnels and blocking them at the border were apparently considered. Those would not have produced the retaliatory rocket fire that Israel needed to justify a larger attack on Gaza, planned — according to Israeli newspapers — since June.

To prepare for the latest attack, Israel denied access to the area for reporters and a prominent Jewish U.N. human-rights official. The latter is among thousands of Jews globally, including Holocaust survivors, who condemn Israel’s violations of international law. More than 1,000 protested in Tel Aviv the day the bombing began.

Uri Avnery, a former Jewish member of Israel’s Knesset, said, “Escalation towards war could and should have been avoided. It was the State of Israel which broke the truce, in the ‘ticking tunnel’ raid on the night of the U.S. elections two months ago. Since then the army went on stoking the fires of escalation with calculated raids and killings, whenever the shooting of missiles on Israel decreased.”

More rockets came, of course, and the United States has condemned them — as we should condemn all attacks on civilians — while ignoring the circumstances that produced them. The resulting massacre is intended to improve Ehud Barak’s ratings in Israel’s presidential race. Some suggest it may draw out Iran, which could then be attacked.

Israel is engaged in a massive campaign of disinformation, but the facts are there. In the Dec. 29 AP timeline on rocket attacks, there were three little words easily missed: “following Israeli incursion.” This is just the tip of the iceberg of hidden information that has ripped a hole in America’s image around the world.

It is time for a closer look. The doors of the burning building can still be unlocked if we learn what is being done in our names.

Susanne Garrison Hoder, of Tiverton, is founder of the Interfaith Peace Initiative. She has traveled independently to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, spending time in the homes of Christians, Muslims and Jews.