The tragic cruelty of the Israeli raids on Lebanon has to be seen not just in terms of the loss of human life – children or adults – but also in terms of the loss of livelihood. The Lebanese economy, which until a few weeks ago was strong and thriving, is about to be shattered once more.

Since the civil war that tore the country asunder and made Beirut a by-word for destruction in the 1970s (it still survives as such in colloquial Maltese), the Lebanese people, aided by sharp business acumen which shows them to be truly the descendants of the Phoenicians, have built their country up again.

Beirut is thriving, full of cafes and restaurants and busy shopping streets and with a steady build-up of tourism. Was, not is – because now all that is gone, and they will soon be back where they were 30 years ago. The tourists caught in the raids have left panicking, airlifted out through arrangements made by their embassies.

No more will be going there, not for a long time. Apparently, Malta will be benefiting from this, but that only goes to show the dire stage we have reached – that we have to be glad of a war elsewhere in the Mediterranean to garner the tourism crumbs.

I feel doubly sorry for the Lebanese because they had worked so hard to make something of their country, and they had succeeded. Until the Israeli attacks, they were justifiably proud of a city that was cosmopolitan and vibrant, and a country that had been dragged out of the mire and was making money and ticking over busily once more.

Its wine industry, led by the estates of Musar, Ksara and Kefraya, has gained world acclaim, with its best wines appreciated by connoisseurs. Many people don't even know there is such a thing as Lebanese wine, still less that it is so good, because in our minds Lebanon is fixed as a Muslim country. Strictly speaking, it is – but it is the only Muslim country that has held fast to the tradition of thousands of years, of putting commerce first and religion second.

For a thousand years, Muslims, Christians and Jews have mingled in Lebanon in the interests of their mercantile concerns, just as they used to do everywhere else in the Muslim world until fairly recently in historical terms. The owner of Chateau Musar is billed as one of the distinguished speakers at the Slow Food events at the Salone di Gusto in Torino in October, but I wonder now how that will pan out. The Lebanese wine industry stands to be disrupted now as it was in the 1970s, so those who love their Lebanese wine had better have the immediate foresight to buy in a good stock of bottles.

Lebanon's continued attachment to the benefits of commerce is possibly the main reason it has held out against the rise of the fundamentalism that has smothered most of the Arab world, with the idea of the state and religion being as one and inseparable (something which Catholic Malta had to endure until Napoleon arrived, closely followed by the British). The Muslims of Lebanon live their religion as the Christians of Europe do – we know that our religion should also be our way of life, but in reality, we put it in a box and don't let it interfere with the rest of our life. We don't let it take over. There's a lot to be said for this, as long as it doesn't lead us to cause harm to others.

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When I was growing up in the 1970s, the word Beirut echoed everywhere. Like with those other words, Richard Nixon, Eisenhower, Vietnam and Jimmy Carter – and of course, Dom Mintoff – you couldn't miss it unless you were unconscious for most of the time. Lebanese refugees began to trickle into Malta before moving on. There was one such girl on my school bus when I was 11; I can still remember exactly what she looked like, and the fact that she wore an armful of beautiful silver bangles (against the school rules, but the nuns let it pass), though not her name. Yet what I remember most of all is one of the “cliquey” girls, of the type I wrote about last week, walking all the way down the aisle of the bus to the front where the young kids sat, and asking her where she had bought those bangles. "Beirut," the Lebanese girl said. "Beirut?" asked Ms Cliquey, a puzzled look coming over her face. "I don't know it. Is it at the Ferries?" With dignity, the refugee girl explained as best she could, in broken English, that Beirut was the city she called home, which just then was practically a mound of rubble.

Ms I-Don't-Know-Beirut must have been at least 16 at the time. It was 1976. Beirut looked like Dresden in World War II. It was in the headlines every day and people were pouring out of the country. It was all the grown-ups could talk about (that, and Mintoff), but clearly not in this girl's household. Either that, or she had been unconscious for a very long time.

* * *

I notice that there are still people like her around, even in these days of invasive media and better education. The word Phoenicians rings a bell, and they like to claim that we are descended from them, as though the colony of Phoenicians of 2,500 years ago continued to sit on this rock and slowly morph into the Maltese of today. Yet the reason some Maltese people were found to have DNA links to Lebanon, in a sampling exercise a couple of years ago, is that Malta was repopulated in early medieval times by Sicilian Muslims, who originally came from Tunis, the location of what was once the greatest Phoenician settlement outside Phoenicia itself.

So yes, in a way we are descended from Phoenicians, but as we would say in conversation, insomma. Then there was the steady influx of people from the Near East, including Lebanon, in later centuries: traders, merchants and slaves who settled here, and whose descendants integrated completely. Our surnames, and our appearance, tell us this. Abela – one of the most common surnames in Malta, one that we think of as typically Maltese – is not Maltese at all. It is widespread in the Near East, including Lebanon. It is not the Near Eastern Abelas who are descendants of Maltese people, as I sometimes hear people suggest (we are, after all, l'ombelico del mondo) but the Maltese Abelas who are descendants of Near Eastern people.

The Sunday Times Rich List – a roll call of the wealthiest people in Britain – includes a Lebanese businessman called Marlon Abela, a name that sounds so very Maltese that I looked twice. But he isn't Maltese; he's a modern-day Phoenician.

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It's reprehensible, but I suppose entirely natural, that I find it easier to sympathise with the plight of the Lebanese than I do with others who are having now to deal with the ravages of war. We relate best to those who are most like ourselves, and Lebanese society and culture is so much like our own, the main difference being that they are better at business. Like the Maltese did, after the ravages of World War II, the political depredations of the 1970s and 1980s, and a diaspora that took away many of the country's sharpest, most able and most enterprising people, the Lebanese forced their country out of the ruins and created an immense success story that won them admiration from all quarters, the most notable exception being Israel. It is like a battle from the Old Testament, fought with bombs instead of swords.

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Expressions of outrage and protests against the Israeli raids have included the opinion that civilian targets should not be attacked.

This is naïve. Since when are wars and battles played by a set of rules? It’s hard enough getting sworn enemies to abide by the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war, still less getting them to stick to the guidelines as to who they should bomb and who they shouldn’t bomb.

Can any of you out there think of a single war or battle in the 20th century and in this one, in which civilians were not maimed or killed, deliberately or otherwise? I can’t. It would be a very odd and clinical war in which the enemy bombed only government departments and military bases.

Maltese civilian targets were par for the course for the German and Italian bombers which passed overhead almost every day and razed large parts of the Grand Harbour area to the ground, 65 years ago. They weren’t aiming for the dockyard and for the Royal Navy ships and missing.

They just didn’t give a damn how many Maltese civilians they killed, because the Maltese were the enemy and they didn’t care if they killed some and destroyed their homes. Remember that when you wave the Italian flag after a football match. Forgiveness is one thing. Forgetting is another.

There are always going to be civilian targets. There are especially going to be civilian targets in this horrible battle. The worst thing, of course, would be for the Lebanese to retaliate in kind, and let rip with pent-up rage that kills plenty of Israeli civilians.

Then we’ve really had it – and I do mean we. A war in the easternmost part of the Mediterranean is just what we don’t need, right now or ever, no matter how many tourists we get through the fall-out.