Nas Daily slammed for 'both sides' take on Israeli occupation of Palestine

Nas Daily slammed for 'both sides' take on Israeli occupation of Palestine
The popular content creator shared his stance on the Israeli-Palestinian 'conflict' earlier this week after years of dodging the subject.
2 min read
06 October, 2022
Vlogger Nuseir Yassin is a Palestinian citizen of Israel [Diarmuid Greene/Sportsfile for Web Summit via Getty]

Nas Daily has come under fire from fellow Palestinians for a video he posted earlier this week on what he called the Israeli-Palestinian "conflict".

The popular content creator, who has almost 10 million subscribers to his YouTube channel, posted a video Tuesday addressing his position on Israel and Palestine as a Palestinian citizen of Israel.

"This video took six years to make," Nas Daily, real name Nuseir Yassin said in a tweet. "It's a story of 'My Israel and Palestine' and it's a complicated one..."

In the video, Yassin says there has been suffering and violence on "both sides".

"My solution is simple - bring people together, not apart," he says.

The video was slammed by other Palestinian content creators for its "simplistic" portrayal of the situation.

"I don't feel like it's fair to just clump the history of the Palestinian people and the struggle with just any other struggle... it's much more complex than that," US-based Palestinian content creator Subhi Taha said.

"For me and for most Palestinians, it's not a conflict, it's ethnic cleansing, it's genocide, it's apartheid, it's discrimination - the list goes on."

"Israel has authority over Palestinians, therefore it's not a conflict."

Palestinian political analyst Omar Baddar said: "What's missing from this vapid and superficial video is any sense of the overwhelming disparity in the scale of suffering and violence - and more importantly, why that suffering and violence exists, namely the political injustice at its core.

"That political injustice is Israel's occupation and apartheid, which are documented by every major human rights organisation in the world.

"If we're interested in ending the suffering and violence impacting both Palestinians and Israelis, then we have to end the political injustice driving it, and that's Israel's apartheid regime of domination, land theft, and violence against Palestinians."

Yassin has come under fire from Palestinians before.

In 2020, the Palestinian grassroots Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign called for a boycott of a vlogger training programme he launched over its "normalisation agenda".

The program included Israelis among its supervising and training staff and was being funded by the UAE New Media Academy founded by Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum.

His controversial new video was retweeted by Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed Al-Nayhan.

The UAE and Israel normalised ties in 2020, through the US-brokered Abraham Accords which was slammed by Palestinians and the Arab street.