It was always John Lennon who was the controversial one, once famously claiming that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus”. Try as he might, though, his former band-mate Sir Paul McCartney, who was due to play his first concert in Israel last night, has been unable to duck the controversy that has swirled around his visit to the Holy Land.

Sir Paul was forced to abandon a trip to the West Bank city of Ramallah on Wednesday because of planned Palestinian protests against his gig, billed as part of the celebrations of the Jewish state’s 60th birthday.

Instead, he was diverted to Bethlehem, where he visited the church marking the birthplace of the man whom Lennon claimed to have eclipsed in the popularity stakes.

Although Sir Paul has insisted that his visit is “apolitical” and a chance to bridge old enmities with music, Palestinians were angered by his perceived patronage of the Jewish state. The Palestinians refer to the celebrations of the foundation of Israel as the naqba – the “disaster”.

Sir Paul, 66, planned to visit a music school set up under the patronage of Edward Said, the late Palestinian political philosopher, and Daniel Barenboim, the Israeli composer, in Ramallah, but in the end he visited another branch of the centre in Bethlehem.

Israel was quick to declare a public relations scoop by luring the singer to play, more than 40 years after the Beatles’ first scheduled gig was cancelled because Israeli authorities feared that the Fab Four would morally corrupt the youth of the austere young state.

“When one of the most admired musicians in the world not only expresses his willingness to visit Tel Aviv, but also publicly talks about the positive things he’s heard about Israel, this is an Israeli diplomatic and PR success of the first order,” said Ron Prosor, the Israeli Ambassador to London, who extended the invitation to Sir Paul and Ringo Starr, the former Beatles drummer.

Extreme right-wing Jewish groups threatened to disrupt the concert in protest at perceived British antiSemitism. They claimed that calls for the British Embassy to shun new premises in Tel Aviv owned by a London billionaire who backs Jewish settlements in the West Bank were a sign of antiJewish discrimination.

Suspected Jewish militants wounded a left-wing Israeli professor with a pipe bomb yesterday, apparently targeting him because he opposed settlement growth and called for a peace deal with the Palestinians. Leaflets were also found calling for the murder of antisettlement activists.

An extremist Jewish settler assassinated Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister, in 1995. Against this back-drop, a Lebanese-based militant cleric cautioned that suicide bombers could target Sir Paul’s concert at Hayarkon Park in Tel Aviv.

While Sir Paul shrugged off the hullabaloo, security was tight around the park where a crowd of more than 50,000 people are expected to make it the biggest concert in Israel’s history.

As for the original controversy back in 1965, when Israel feared that Beatle-mania could subvert its young, Sir Paul bears no grudges. “We thought it was quite amusing really, being banned,” he wrote on his website.

“It’s kind of cute that they are apolo-gising. It’s very courteous, but you know I wasn’t really offended in the first place.”

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