The Lebanese always return home

You might have thought that the threat of the Gaza war spiralling into an all-out regional conflagration, along with breathless travel advice from western governments urging their nationals to leave the country, would have deterred Lebanon’s expats from flying home to celebrate Eid al-Fitr this year. Not one bit. Flights, hotels and restaurants were fully booked despite Iran’s drone strike.

The Lebanese know that even if there is fighting (and in South Lebanon, there is on an almost daily basis), if it isn’t on your doorstep, there’s no reason to stop the party.

In any case, the Lebanese always think they have the inside track. ‘We knew it wouldn’t come to much,’ a friend assured me after Beirut airport reopened at 7 a.m. on Sunday. ‘There was a deal. No one wanted an escalation. It was less dangerous than a night out in London.’

This cheery indifference to danger and an almost fanatical obsession with finding any excuse to come home is typically Lebanese and, ironically, a by-product of a long history of emigration, one that has existed since the first millennium bc when King Hiram of Tyre despatched his people across the sea to establish trading colonies. Since then, poverty, persecution, war – in some cases all three – have been contributing factors. We Lebanese go abroad; we work, we make money, we come back and show everyone how well we’ve done by building a McMansion.

Take my Lebanese grandfather. Sometime in the late 19th century he killed a man who insulted his mother. His father put him on a boat to Brazil where he opened a trading company, became a freemason, married a Swede and, when the heat had died down, returned to his village, a relatively prosperous man with a foreign wife.