Perhaps the most egregious crime attending the distorted media coverage on the conflict is the casual acceptance of the claim that the triggering events of the violence were the closure (now open) of the al aqsa mosque on the Temple mount, and the attempted eviction of a few Palestinian families from apartments in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of E. Jerusalem - without any attempt to substantiate that claim or to contextualize those events.
Equally, if not more, plausible is the claim that those events served as convenient excuses for fomenting violence in order to test the new US administration and divert attention away from the demand for Abbas to hold a long overdue election that he just recently postponed, again. In fact, as I will now explain, it is likely that the occupation of the mosque by Israeli forces was deliberately engineered for that purpose.
The context: Palestinian agitators stockpiled a mountain of large stones (small rocks) inside the mosque which they threw down on Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall. The mosque is on the high ground overlooking (right above) the Western Wall. This left the police no alternative but to enter the mosque and close it until the rocks had been cleaned out.
The situation regarding the E. Jerusalem apartments is more complicated. These apartments were owned by Jewish families prior to 1948, going back many generations when Jews lived in the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem. In 1948, during the war of Israel independence, Jordan ethnically cleansed all of the Jews from that quarter. Between 1948 and 1967 no Jews lived there. They had left their ancestral homes with what they could carry with them. Arab families moved into the handful of Jewish homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. In 1967 when Jerusalem was unified, the original families sued to get their properties back. The Court denied the motion but required the occupying families to pay them rent, something which they have consistently refused to do.
The law suit drags on. It is neither new, nor simple. One may question the merits of the conflicting claims, but to suggest that it is a precipitating justification of Arab riots or rocket barrages from Gaza is, at best, woeful ignorance and/or laziness, and more likely disingenuous. In particular, for any journalist with a modicum of integrity, to ignore this context is beyond reprehensible, yet this is, with very few exceptions, the common practice.