Nobody should be surprised that Jerusalem is once again a site of conflict. Clashes in the city have reignited following this summer’s murders of three Jewish yeshiva students and a Palestinian teen and the subsequent Gaza war in which Israel killed more than 2,100 Palestinians, most of whom were civilians.

In the fall, Israel restricted Palestinians’ right to worship at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and there has been a series of attacks and counter-attacks in Jerusalem including the hanging death of bus driver Yusuf Hasan al-Ramuni and the murder of four Israeli civilians and an Israeli police officer in a synagogue. But media coverage of fighting in the city since October has failed to situate it in its larger context. What these accounts completely avoid is the deep structural crisis that makes peace in Palestine so elusive.

One popular explanation for the bloodshed is that Israelis and Palestinians are battling each other in some type of religious war. For example, the Los Angeles Times argues that the fate of the site regarded by Jews as the Temple Mount and by Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary is “now driving the conflict,” a view that overstates the centrality of religion to the Israel-Palestine struggle and ignores many other important factors.