By ETHAN BRONNER

JERUSALEM - In 1965, when Israel had no television and public entertainment consisted largely of kibbutz songfests celebrating the wheat harvest, the Beatles were booked for a concert here. To young Israeli fans, it seemed an impossible dream.
And so it was. The official permission required to withdraw precious foreign currency to pay the band was denied because a ministerial committee feared the corrupting influence of four long-haired Englishmen singing about pleasure. As its report said, “The Beatles have an insufficient artistic level and cannot add to the spiritual and cultural life of the youth in Israel.”
Since then, especially in recent years, Israel has expressed embarrassment about the episode and tried to make amends. Last January, it sent a letter to the remaining Beatles, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, asking forgiveness for the “missed opportunity” to have the band that “shaped the minds of a generation, to come to Israel and perform before the young generation in Israel who admired you and continues to admire you.” The artists were asked to consider again coming to perform.
Now Mr. McCartney has been booked for a huge outdoor concert in Tel Aviv on September 25. And nearly everything about the event - the $8 million price tag borne by a Israeli financier who expects to turn a profit, the tickets selling for hundreds of dollars on the Internet, indeed its very existence - is a parable of a nation transformed.
The promised concert has led many here to reflect on the cocooned simplicity of life only four decades ago. “I had just gotten my first LP record for my bar mitzvah from my two best friends, and it was by the Beatles,” recalled Yoel Esteron, 55, editor of the daily business newspaper Calcalist. “And then they canceled the concert. We still had no television and only official radio stations. We were living in a cultural ghetto; the country was Bolshevik. Teenagers and their parents debated it for weeks. Every teenager was furious.”
For Yossi Sarid, a leftist former Parliament member and government minister, the arrival of Mr. McCartney is an opportunity to set the story straight about his father, Yaakov Sarid, who was the director general of the Education and Culture Ministry and an official involved in canceling the original concert.
In an article in the newspaper Haaretz on August 25, Yossi Sarid said the real cause of the cancellation was a rivalry between impresarios . One had been offered a Beatles concert in 1962, before their star had risen, and had turned them down. When a competitor booked them three years later, the first impresario used his government connections to cancel the show.
The performers may have been known as the Beatles, but in Israel, then still trying earnestly to create a culture buffered from foreign words and influence, they were Hipushiot Haketzev, or the Beat Beetles.
Mr. Sarid said he was grateful to the musicians. Thanks to their canceled concert, he said, his father, a great educator and modest man whose accomplishments would have long ago been forgotten, has earned an eternal place in Israeli history.