They are very distinct from the Arabian Peninsula Arabs in Saudi and the Gulf states. As a vibrant trading area (remember the Phoenicians? They're called Lebanese now) for thousands of years and as a part of several empires, Phoenician, Persian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, and Ottoman it has always been a crossroad of races and cultures. Levantine Arabs, because of their business savvy and education, are the imported middle management and professionals -medicine for example - backbone of the Gulf states. And because its the original heartland of early Christianity and the mass conversions during the Crusades it's also where there has been a significant Arab Christian population.
I remember being hosted, single and in my late twenties, at the home of a Christian customer in Damascus who made sure his marriageable daughter sat beside me at dinner and as we looked through the family album with pictures of her at the beach in a bathing suit. I was being cultivated as ticket the Hell out of Syria and to America for the family. These Arabs more or less invented the real Art of the Deal and I learned a lot doing business with them.
Oh I see, so it sounds like the Levantine Arabs maybe speak Arabic but must be ethnically very different from the Arabs in the Gulf. Even some of the North African Christian converts from Algeria and Morocco (they had a bunch of them in Germany, France and Belgium esp) looked surprisingly European, but they didn’t look the same as the Syrians and Lebanese— I think maybe that’s just because the Romans and then the Vandals were in North Africa so much, plus the Barbary pirates taking all those European slaves, so a lot of the Bedouin Arabs maybe have something similar like the Levanine Arabs but not the same. I guess I had this image in my mind from the work in Dubai and Yemen since the ones in the Gulf are more like the “Arab Arabs” we often assume. BTW the Arabs in the Gulf countries like UAE and Yemen are the most virulent racist I’ve ever seen against Africans, they basically use “African” and “slave” interchangeable which in a way isn’t surprising since the ones in the Gulf started the African slave trade that American whites somehow all get blamed for. Just shows what a pack of lies the cultural Marxists hypocrites in US universities are always saying, their real goal is just to divide and weaken the Western culture of the US, no real social justice goals there.
And come to think of it, what you’re saying about the Levantine Arab description makes sense from the ones I was talking to in the churches, tons of the Syrians (and many of the Turks and Kurds) were indeed professionals involved in very successful business and trades like engineering, law and medicine, and they very much knew their way around international trade. Several of the ones I talked to even knew my own business in import and export better than I did, they could speak 5 or 6 languages sometimes and could quote the currency exchange rates and the best shipping routes by heart.
One of the most baffling things I saw in my recent trip in fact was a neighborhood in Malmo in Sweden where they have a lot of the Assyria Christians (I think that’s common term) and many of the newer Syrian and Iraqi refugees, again with the churches filled with recent converts. There was a street market full of stalls outside where a lot of the newcomers were selling imported goods, a pretty good way I guess to get on their feet on the ground economically. One of the young women at a popular salad vending kiosk looked blonder and fairer skinned than most of the Swedes at the market, like a model to be honest about it. Yet when the American guys there (probably hoping for a date) kept trying to practice their Swedish on her, she kept laughing and saying she was from Damascus in Syria. I guess she must have gotten a kick out of all the shocked looks she got from that.