BTW, some Lebanese really are surprisingly white, especially among their Christian community. It's definitely not uncommon to see Lebanese people who can easily pass for being even French or northern Italian, never mind Andalusian or Sicilian. Same goes for Syrians. But of course it's also true that many, if not most Lebanese carry a strong "semitic" look.
As I discussed with Alan, the similarities, in my opinion, are due to shared EEF like ancestry, in general, and the fact that due to climatic differences, the selection for depigmentation alleles was not as strong in some parts of southern Europe as it was in most of northern Europe. There are definitely differences, however. The Levant has seen inflows of other "components", including recent SSA. (even in the Lebanese Christians) Certain Near Eastern populations have a lot more ANE than southern Europeans as well and some of what I might describe as "Indic" admixture or Siberian admixture. There might also be heavier selection (after the Neolithic) for certain phenotypes, and later migrations spread them around. Of course, steppe migrations brought some of those phenotypes all over Europe. However, an additional dose probably hit the southeastern and some parts of the south central Mediterranean (and even southwest Mediterranean to some lesser degree) with later Bronze Age and perhaps Iron Age migrations.
The result is that there is some overlap. However, without some serious cherrypicking going on, an
average group of Levantines would not "fit" very well in southern Europe, not even the Christian Levantines, although better in some places than in others. And I'm extremely familiar with both groups.
Could some fit? Absolutely. Are there anything other than a few outliers who look more "European" to north Europeans than do average southern Europeans? No. I can assure you that if I'm walking around the Universita' degli Stranieri in Perugia or the University in Florence I have no trouble distinguishing the Italians from the Lebanese in the vast majority of cases. Whether a northern European or even more, a North American" could do so is a whole other story. I'm afraid that for them dark hair, eyes, an olive complexion, and anything other than a concave nose means you look like modern Near Easterners. There's a lot more to it than that.
However, if there is going to be an extended discussion of phenotypes, let's take it to the physical anthropology thread.
The reason that Christian Levantines and even the Druze to some extent look
more "European" is because, in my opinion, they are a relict of more "ancient" population groups which did not get as much gene flow from perhaps more drifted Arabian genetics and phenotypes and also from the slaves imported by the Arabs.
