Nas Daily invites followers to stay in his Rawabi and Tel Aviv apartments
Palestinian-Israeli Social Media star hopes to educate people on the conflict by calling on them to see for themselves.
By AMY SPIROUpdated: OCTOBER 5, 2018 03:56Rawabi_Panorama(photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Nuseir Yassin, better known in the blogosphere as Nas Daily, is inviting his eight million followers to stay in Israel and Palestine for free. Yes, free.The Arab-Israeli vlogger announced this week that he has acquired two apartments – one in Tel Aviv and the other in the planned Palestinian city of Rawabi – to allow visitors to stay in without any charge.“Everybody knows that Israel and Palestine are at a never-ending conflict,” said Yassin in the video he uploaded on Tuesday. “And we all must do something, anything, to help fix it.”So Yassin, a native of the city of Arraba (pop. 25,000) in the Lower Galilee who has been traveling the globe for two years posting daily one-minute videos, wants to encourage people to check things out for themselves.“This is not a real-estate investment or a charity project,” he said. “This is just a way to get more people to think of the conflict not as Israel vs. Palestine but as Israel and Palestine. You must try to understand both countries, not just one. And I am convinced that when enough people think like that, the conflict could finally come to an end.”Yassin wrote that he wanted to “encourage more people to visit my homeland and see for themselves realities on the ground instead of judging from thousands of miles away.”The vlogger, who is currently in Canada, did not respond to a request for comment from The Jerusalem Post.Yassin purchased an apartment in Rawabi earlier this year, and in May he uploaded a video announcing that it was open for business.Rawabi is a model city north of Ramallah in the West Bank whose first residents took possession of their apartments in 2015. Designed to house 40,000 people, the city is still under construction.
“I think 99.999% of you won’t stay at the apartment,” he wrote at the time. “It’s mostly symbolic. But in the middle of all of this mess between Israel and Palestine, I want to help in my own way.”Yassin received a scholarship to study economics at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After graduating, he moved to New York City to work in the tech industry. He began coding for the PayPal-owned money-transfer app, Venmo, where he says his salary was well above $100,000 per year. In 2016, he quit his job. Adopting the moniker “Nas” – Arabic for “people” – he set up his Nas Daily Facebook page, where he committed to posting a video every day for 1,000 days. While Yassin’s posts cover a range of topics, the vlogger regularly vocalizes his thoughts on the conflict in his native country.“I’m Palestinian-Israeli, that’s how I define myself,” he told the Post while visiting Israel last year. “I’m not going to say I’m full Israeli, but I’m also definitely not full Palestinian. I think it’s possible to balance both worlds.”A year ago, he also created a video decrying the BDS movement as "pure politics." Yassin was frustrated that Kuwait Airlines wouldn't allow him to fly from New York to India on his Israeli passport.“Because I’m an Israeli, an entire airline is not allowed to take me on their plane even if I’m not going to Kuwait,” he said in the video. “Dear Kuwait: If you want to boycott Israel, be my guest, refuse me service,” he said. “But also give me your USB flash drives, your phones, your safe-driving cars, your Viber, your Waze or your anti-virus – this is also Israel.”Yassin said those who seek to boycott the State of Israel prove that they really don’t get it at all.“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.”When Yassin purchased his apartment in Rawabi earlier this year, he said then that he was working on also finding a place in Israel to offer for guests. This week he announced that he has rented an apartment in Tel Aviv that will be available beginning October 10.“What I hope it does is send a message that we must start thinking of both countries, not just one or the other,” he said on Tuesday. “It’s Israel AND Palestine. Not Israel OR Palestine.”
