There was little progress until recently, but now Mr. McCartney has been booked for a huge outdoor concert in Tel Aviv on Sept. 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 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 reminisce and set the record 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.

Image The Beatles in London in 1965 before flying to the United States. They were also booked for Israel, but the concert was canceled. The band was deemed to have an insufficient artistic level. Credit... Associated Press

In a front-page article in the newspaper Haaretz on Monday, Yossi Sarid said the real cause of the cancellation was a rivalry between impresarios at the time. One had been offered a Beatles concert in 1962, before their star had risen, by the mother of the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein, and had turned them down. When a competitor booked them three years later, the first impresario used his government connections to keep the needed money from being disbursed.