Imagine if this was Israel shelling a Palestinian refugee camp

The BBC report very quietly that:

'Thousands of Palestinian refugees have been forced to flee a camp in the Syrian port of Latakia amid shelling by government troops, the UN says.

A spokesman for the United Nations Relief and Works agency (Unrwa) told the BBC that more than 5,000 of the 10,000 refugees were on the move.

He said at least four people had died, urging immediate access to the site.

Some 30 people have reportedly died in Latakia in a three-day military attack. Syria says it is tackling gangs.'

This is a very low-profile story on the BBC website and I haven't noticed it being reported on the BBC Radio 4 news at all.

Now imagine the coverage if Israel had shelled a Palestinian refugee camp. This attack would be headline news on all BBC news outlets, there would be banner headlines on the BBC news website and Jeremy AlBowen would be pontificating in full indignant mood. Are the lives of Palestinian refugees in Syria less important than that of Palestinian refugees in Gaza? Or is it just that Israel is fair game whereas whatever Syria does has to be seen against the backdrop of its implacable opposition to Israel?

Of course there is another possibility and that is that the BBC's carefully constructed narrative is that Israel keeps the poor Palestinians in the 'concentration  camps' that are Gaza and the West Bank. If the British public realised that the Syrians and Lebanese keep their Palestinians in camps with less freedom than the Palestinians enjoy in Gaza and the West Bank then the narrative might suffer. The truth is that the Arab countries implemented special laws designed to make it impossible to integrate the Palestinian refugees from the 1948 Arab war against Israel. No descendant of Palestinian refugees who are born in another Arab country and live there their entire lives can ever gain that country's passport. Even if a 'Palestinian' marries a citizen of an Arab country, they cannot become citizens of their spouse's country. Once a Palestinian, always a Palestinian even if they have never set foot in 'Palestine'. This policy of forcing a Palestinian identity on these people for eternity and condemning them to a miserable life in refugee camps was designed to perpetuate and exacerbate the Palestinian refugee crisis. For more on this aspect of the Palestinian problem take a read of this Real Clear World article.