Manifesto

We were scattered, and we did well.

For nine decades the Lebanese have left. Some left for opportunity, most left for reasons they did not choose. They arrived in São Paulo and Buenos Aires, in Abidjan and Dakar, in Detroit and Sydney and Paris, and they built. Today there are more people of Lebanese origin outside Lebanon than inside it. Perhaps twice as many, perhaps more. They run companies, hospitals, ministries, universities and banks on six continents.

This is usually recited as a source of pride. We would rather treat it as an unused asset.

And we stayed scattered.

A network that does not know itself is not a network. It is a coincidence. A Lebanese engineer in Calgary and a Lebanese engineer in Kuala Lumpur have more in common professionally than either has with most of their colleagues, and neither will ever learn the other exists. Multiply that by several million and you have the exact shape of what we have wasted.

What we send home, and what we do not.

In 2024 Lebanon received roughly 5.8 billion dollars in remittances, close to eighteen percent of the economy, and in recent years as much as a third of it. The diaspora is, by a wide margin, the country's largest external support.

Almost all of it arrives as money sent from one person to their family. Almost none of it arrives as judgement, governance, market access, or institutional expertise, though the diaspora holds more of those than it holds cash. There has never been a vehicle built to carry them. That is the omission this institution was founded to correct.

What we refuse.

No party, no candidate, no government, no faction. This is written into the charter as grounds for expulsion rather than as a value statement, because a value statement is what an institution says before it does the opposite. No serving political officeholder sits on the Council.

No confessional question, at any stage. Not asked on the application, not recorded on the roll, never a criterion. A record that sorts people before it admits them is not a record of Lebanese achievement, it is a scoreboard, and there are enough of those.

No fund. We do not pool capital, we do not invest, and we do not take a percentage of anything that happens between two members. The moment an institution stands to gain from an introduction, every introduction it makes is suspect.

No seats for sale, no honorary titles, and no place on the roll that money can reach. The record is free to read and always will be. When membership opens, dues will pay for the institution and buy access to the register and to the floor. They will buy nothing else.

Every one of those is a door we have closed on ourselves on purpose. Each is a specific way a body like this has failed before, and most of them failed while insisting they never would.

What we are for.

One thing, stated plainly: to make the Lebanese abroad reachable by each other, to a standard.

That breaks into three. A record that can be checked, where every entry is sourced and anything we cannot verify is left out. An introduction that carries weight, because it travels through somebody who knows you both and is willing to be named. And a published position on the questions that concern Lebanon and the Lebanese abroad, taken when silence would be the more political act.

We are not here to represent the Lebanese. Nobody can, and everybody who has claimed to has ended up representing a fraction of them against the rest.

Membership has not opened yet. What it will carry is going to grow, and some of it will be substantial, but it is deliberately not listed here. An institution that opens by advertising benefits it has not built is asking to be judged on the gap between the two. The record will show them when they exist.

The only test that matters is whether a member writes to a stranger inside this institution and gets an answer. Everything else on this page is machinery for that one outcome.

Who belongs here.

Lebanese nationals and those of Lebanese descent at any remove. Descent is declared, not proven. We do not ask anyone to produce documents for a grandmother who left Zahle in 1912, because the paperwork of that period recorded our people under somebody else’s empire, and the absence of a document proves nothing except how badly the counting was done.

Senior standing, or a clear trajectory towards it, in enterprise, the professions, public and institutional life, science and technology, or culture. Seniority here means responsibility for outcomes, not a title.

Every application is read by a person. Not filtered, not scored, read. Automatic admission is the single thing that has killed every diaspora list that came before this one, because the confidence that makes a network worth joining is destroyed the moment it admits somebody who will not answer.

So what is actually being screened for is not status. It is whether you will pick up.

Fourteen days to a decision, and a deferral comes with a reason and with what would change the answer. We would rather be small and answered than large and ignored.

What we ask of you.

Dues, which are published and modest, and which pay for the institution rather than for anyone's ambitions. Your name on the charter. Discretion about what is said on the floor.

And one thing more, which matters more than the others: that you be useful to another member at least once a year. Answer a request. Make an introduction. Sit with someone thirty years younger. We keep a record of it, not to rank anyone, but because an institution built on generosity should be able to see where the generosity comes from.

Ahla w sahla.