The Beatles in London in 1965 before flying to the United States. They were also booked for Israel, but the concert was cancelled.

In 1965, when Israel had no television, and public entertainment consisted largely of kibbutz songfests celebrating the wheat harvest, the Beatles, already international celebrities, were booked for a concert here. To young Israeli fans, it seemed an impossible dream.
The Beatles were also booked for Israel, but the concert was cancelled. The band was deemed to have “an insufficient artistic level.”
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 the committee report put it, “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 from its London embassy 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 artistes were asked to consider again coming to perform.
There was little progress until recently, but now 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 high-flying Israeli financier who expects to turn a profit, the tickets selling for hundreds of dollars that are being gobbled up through Internet sales, 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 cancelled 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.”
Israel's leaders in the early 1960s knew almost nothing of global popular culture. There is a famous story told of David Ben-Gurion, the founding prime minister, when he read a headline in a mass-selling paper that said Elizabeth Taylor, then among the world's most famous women, was very ill. “Who's Elizabeth Taylor?” Ben-Gurion is said to have asked.
A glance at the printed tickets for the cancelled 1965 Beatles concert, copies of which still exist as collectors' items, and can be viewed on the Internet, tell their own story of a bygone era.
The marked price, in the lira currency, then under enormous pressure and now defunct, amounted to about $7.
The Hebrew name for the group printed on the tickets is also worth noting. The performers may have been universally 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 (like the bugs).
It was a laborious if endearing effort that no one would bother with today in a country where English permeates daily speech (“sorry,” “whatever”) and advertising logos, and where many official Hebrew names for new developments simply do not enter the mainstream vocabulary.
Esteron, the editor, like others, said the change in 40 years from an isolated, egalitarian and agrarian society to a market-driven, plugged-in, high-tech haven of enormous wealth -- and some alarming poverty -- had been dizzying and somehow oddly embodied by the story of its relationship with the Beatles.

Source: The New York Times