How Nas Daily whitewashes Israel’s crimes

Nuseir Yassin, creator of Nas Daily, has a social media following of more than 20 million people.

 Winson WongSCMP

Tamara Nassar and Ali Abunimah -21 December 2020

Nuseir Yassin, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, has come under fire in recent years for his popular Facebook page Nas Daily.

Critics accuse him of whitewashing Israel’s crimes by falsely equating a colonial occupier with its victims and playing native informant while “reifying Zionism’s most toxic fantasies,” as Palestinian American commentator Steven Salaita has put it.

Not least, Yassin opposes BDS – the global boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign – led by Palestinians to help their struggle for liberation.

Yassin and his Israeli American partner recently moved to the United Arab Emirates where they are working to boost the country’s image after its normalization deal with Israel.

In September, Palestinians called for a boycott of one of Yassin’s latest ventures, The Next Nas Daily.

And this month, BDS groups in Arab countries launched one of their largest recent social media campaigns, amplifying that call.

Who is Nas?

So who is Yassin and why does he generate so much criticism from supporters of Palestinian rights?

Yassin was born and raised in Arraba, a Palestinian village in the north of Israel.

He graduated from Harvard University in 2014 with degrees in economics and computer science and started working at Venmo, the payment app owned by PayPal.

Almost two years later, according to Around the World in 60 Seconds, his co-authored memoir published by HarperCollins, Yassin quit his job, started traveling and kept a video blog on Facebook.

That’s when he started Nas Daily, a project to make a one-minute video every day for 1,000 days.

“Nas” is his own nickname and also the Arabic word for “people.”

He has amassed more than 20 million followers on social media, mostly on Facebook, drawn by his videos showcasing the people he meets, the food he eats and the countries he visits.

Such a following gives him enormous influence, whatever his message.

Many of Yassin’s videos end with a clip of him surrounded by fans shouting his tagline, “That’s one minute, see you tomorrow.”

He has now branched into other ventures, including Nas Academy, Nas Studios, and a podcast called Nas Talks. Yassin estimates his net worth at $5 million.

Yassin’s Israeli American partner Alyne Tamir travels around the world with him and makes frequent appearances in his videos.

Tamir also produces her own social media content, including a website that features a “quick history” of Israel.

Indeed it is so quick that it completely omits the Nakba, the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by Zionist militias.

Boycott

It is Yassin’s latest venture, The Next Nas Daily, that has been the focus of recent boycott calls.

Yassin describes it as a campaign to train 80 “Arab media creators” to make viral videos.

“My team and I will train you, we will design a channel for you, we will support you,” Yassin explains in a video.

“And best of all, we will give you a salary too,” he adds. “For six months we will give you enough to survive.”

Working 12-hour days, Yassin’s trainees are required to upload three videos a week about “anything that you like and put it on the internet in Arabic.”

“How do I make my money back?” Yassin asks. “It’s easy. If one of you becomes the next Nas Daily, we both win.” This suggests that those taking part will be required to sign over intellectual property rights to Yassin.

The venture is supported by the New Media Academy, a school founded by the ruler of Dubai and prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum.

Palestine’s BDS National Committee, which spearheads the global boycott campaign, has spoken out against Yassin’s new project.

The committee said “the backing of the authoritarian Emirati regime” for Yassin’s project “constitutes explicit complicity” in Israel’s efforts to “polish the crimes of its settler-colonial regime and apartheid state.”

Undoubtedly, The Next Nas Daily also aims to create a buzz that will generate business for Nas Academy: Those not picked to take part in The Next Nas Daily can still avail themselves of online courses ranging in price from $99 to $499.

Notably, the head trainer at the Nas Academy is Yonatan Belik, a videographer who served in the Israeli army. Belik was a commander in the Sar-El program, which recruits foreign volunteers to work on Israeli military bases.

He also boasted of motivating high school seniors to join the Israeli military.

Belik is a former trainer at Seeds of Peace, a normalization initiative that holds summer camps for young Palestinians and Israelis in order to promote “coexistence” before sending them back to live out their separate and unequal realities.

Withdrawals

The boycott call prompted participants to start withdrawing from The Next Nas Daily.

Israa Elshareef, a Palestinian journalist from Gaza living in Istanbul, pulled out in September.

“It was really a unique opportunity, but our cause is more important than any opportunity,” Elshareef wrote on Instagram.

She told The Electronic Intifada that she withdrew because she saw The Next Nas Daily as a program aimed at normalization with Israel and because it is backed by the New Media Academy.

Yemeni YouTuber Abdulrahman Algamily revealed that Yassin’s company approached him to take part in The Next Nas Daily.

Algamily said that a Zoom meeting with Yassin’s company raised red flags.

His political concerns, as well as how the program was structured to effectively control the content creators, compelled Algamily to decline to participate.

Algamily criticized Yassin for his coverage of Palestine, accusing him of whitewashing Israel’s crimes.

“Imagine if 80 influential Arab content creators adopt these messages. Messages of normalization, messages of support for the occupation,” Algamily said.

Jordanian YouTuber Marwan Al Bayari withdrew because he was concerned that The Next Nas Daily would restrict him from criticizing Israel.

And Palestinian YouTuber Fadi Younes quit as a trainer for The Next Nas Daily after discussions with the BDS National Committee.

In a video explaining his decision, Younes includes a clip from a training session in which he told Nas Academy participants, “I am personally against normalization” and that he “only recognizes Palestine.”

Yassin responds

Yassin responded to the boycott call in September with a video posted exclusively on his Arabic Facebook page titled “Beware of the Arab loser.”

Yassin claims that jealousy of his success is behind the call to boycott him.

Targeting an Arab audience, the video aims to portray Yassin as something he is not: a strong and consistent critic of Israel.

For example, last June, amid the popular uprisings in the United States sparked by the killing of George Floyd, Yassin made a video about police brutality.

It briefly mentions the killing by Israeli Border Police of Iyad Hallaq, a Palestinian man with disabilities shot dead in Jerusalem just days after Floyd was choked to death in Minnesota.

Yet Yassin barely relates these crimes to the systemic racism of the United States and Israel. Rather, he puts them down largely to a lack of training that leads police forces to employ too many “bad apples.”

In the case of Hallaq, Yassin doesn’t even mention that the killing took place in occupied East Jerusalem, rather, describing it in the broader context of being “in Israel.”

Because Hallaq’s killing occurred in occupied territory, the human rights group Al-Haq has described it as a war crime.

“I respect the police, I really do,” Yassin insists.

He urges police to hire more “empathetic” officers, adding that “they exist” as copaganda images – pro-police propaganda that undermines the movement for Black lives and deflects calls to defund the police – flash across the screen.

Yassin includes the brief clip about Hallaq from the police brutality video within his “Beware of the Arab loser” video.

He offers it as an example of how he “hates the Israeli government, and I’ve made videos about this.” In fact, the police brutality video includes only the mildest criticisms of Israel, and says nothing about Yassin’s alleged hatred for its government.

Despite his whitewash of systemic police violence generally and Hallaq’s killing in particular, Yassin uses Hallaq’s image to shield himself from criticism about his promotion of pro-Israel propaganda.

Yassin then embarks on a racist rant singling out “Arab civilization” as particularly prone to failure and violence – a theme he returns to regularly.

“This is the problem of Arab civilization,” he says in the video.

“If you look at Arab countries, all Arab countries have problems. There are wars. There is ISIS. There is killing. There is poverty. Why? I have never in my life seen such a civilization.”

Yassin’s solution is individual striving – a version of the illusory American dream – in which anyone can succeed like him if they ignore the “Arab loser” and just focus on their personal goals.

Feeling pressure

Defiant as he is, Yassin is evidently feeling the pressure.

In October, he attacked Al Jazeera for reporting on the call to boycott his projects.

“This is fake news targeted at us by a government,” he claimed, merely on the basis that Al Jazeera is funded by Qatar.

The cause of his ire was this video made by the network’s AJ+ unit:

Notably, Yassin’s LinkedIn profile shows he has previously done freelance work for AJ+.

The video which ruffled Yassin’s feathers features Mahmoud Nawajaa, the general coordinator of the BDS movement, discussing why many Palestinians are so critical of Yassin’s work.

Nawajaa does not accuse Yassin of receiving direct support from Israel.

But he does say that Yassin’s videos consistently obscure Israel’s crimes against Palestinians and burnish its image in line with its “Brand Israel” campaign.

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