BDS calls on Arab content creators to boycott Arab-Israeli Nas Daily

Nuseir Yassin, 28, a native of Arrabe in the Lower Galilee, operates a Facebook page with over 17 million subscribers. He rose to popularity featuring one-minute daily videos of his worldly travels.

By ZACHARY KEYSER
NUSEIR YASSIN, aka Nas Daily, during a video filmed in Jerusalem. (photo credit: screenshot)
NUSEIR YASSIN, aka Nas Daily, during a video filmed in Jerusalem.
(photo credit: screenshot)
The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement has directed Arab content creators to avoid working with popular Israeli-Palestinian video blogger Nas Daily, according to an official BDS statement.
Nuseir Yassin, 28, a native of Arrabe in the Lower Galilee, operates a Facebook page with over 17 million subscribers. He rose to popularity featuring one-minute daily videos of his travels around the globe.
Yassin, a Harvard graduate, was living and working in New York in 2016 when he decided to quit his job and travel the globe for 1,000 days. The self-identified Israeli-Palestinian has visited almost every corner of the globe, from China to Japan, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Chile, Peru, Canada, Iceland, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Italy, Jordan, Morocco, Kenya, Rwanda and many more countries.
Sprinkled among his 1,000 videos were also many missives relating to his home country, and to the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
On the official BDS website, the movement released a statement in Arabic stating that "the Palestinian National Committee for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) calls – [in] the widest coalition in Palestinian society in the homeland and diaspora – [for] content makers and influencers in the Arab region to boycott the upcoming 'Nas Daily' program, which aims to implicate them in normalizing relations with Israel and cover up its crimes.
"While the National Boycott Committee salutes the content makers who refused to engage in this normalization project, it calls on all participants to withdraw immediately and refrain from [justifying the] cover up the crimes of the occupation, in commitment to their national and moral responsibility first, and based on their responsibility as influencers and content makers secondly," it added.
The organization also noted its dismay with the fact that Israelis will supervise and train staff at the Nas Academy, which trains Arab content creators. It said that the initiative – sponsored by New Media Academy, an Emirati company – supports "occupation," considering Yassin "is steeped in normalization" and "produces and broadcasts soft, normalized content that wrestles Israel from its true context and nature based on criminality and ethnic cleansing."
In October 2017, Yassin slammed the BDS movement as “pure politics,” saying that it harms people like him who are Palestinians with Israeli citizenship.
“If you want to boycott Israel because of Palestine, I don’t think you actually care,” he said, “because you’re also boycotting two million Muslim Palestinian Israelis.”
He organized many meet-ups around the globe, including one in Jerusalem in July 2017, designed to bring together Israelis and Palestinians for dialogue.
“It’s just a tiny little gathering of people that are in the middle – that want both peoples to succeed,” Yassin told The Jerusalem Post at the time. “It’s going to be a place where east Jerusalem and west Jerusalem and Tel Aviv are going to be in the same room together – which doesn’t happen very often.”
His third-to-last video of the journey, posted on Thursday, was titled “The truth about Jews and Arabs.”
In the video, which has already been viewed more than three million times, Yassin said that while there is a lot of hatred on both sides, not all is lost.
 “The majority of Jews and Arabs actually want to get along,” he claimed. “Don’t let the few bad apples ruin it for everybody.”
Amy Spiro contributed to this report.