I am about to do something that is considered blasphemous, sacrilegious, and traitorous on British soil – I am going to quibble over Sir Paul McCartney.

During the height of the McCartney-Mills debacle, the equally unsavoury Heather Mills was lampooned like a medieval witch, with the British tabloids coming within an inch of dunking her in the village pond every Sunday to check if she floated.

So it is with some trepidation that I revolt against the cultural grooming that has touched my life in Britain, in which The Beatles are held aloft as relics for our times, and McCartney is the grand don.

It is a fact that performing artists defy calls to boycott Israel and meander through the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem bearing expressions of piety while pondering from whence the next latte shall emerge.

McCartney’s trip is slightly different; although it is this difference that awoke me this morning in a cantankerous mood, as his reedy voice piped through the radio that he wished to promote peace for the “Jewish-Palestinian conflict”.

Yet therein lies the rub: denoting the conflict along ‘Jewish-Palestinian’ lines establishes an undertone of religio-geographical issues.

Indubitably religion and geography feature – it is the Holy Land after all – but the conflict is not directed at Israelis because they are Jewish, it is far more nuanced than that.

A Jewish community has long flourished in the Holy Land, and indeed blossomed peacefully alongside its Muslim and Christian neighbours, until 1948.

1948 holds the key to the conflict: it is a conflict between Israelis and Palestinians; occupiers and the oppressed and exiled; those who take, and those who have been bereft.

It is about land, a country for a people without a land, both then and now, rather than mere prattling because one is Jewish and the other is not.

I have previously mentioned on this blog a succinct expression of the significance of this differentiation during a conversation with an Israeli from Jerusalem.

For him, the troubles in Palestine started in 1948; his family had lived in Jerusalem since time immemorial, long before the influxes began to arrive and proclaim the land ‘Eretz Israel’.

In his eyes, he – and his family – are Jewish Palestinians, existing on the land since it was, and shall always be, Palestine.

Thus, McCartney’s well-meaning quip exposed a chasm of misunderstanding that for me at least, besmirched the plethora of photo-calls comprising the sexagenarian’s awe-struck visage clasping candles in the Church of the Nativity, or explaining who he was to befuddled West Bank residents.

As Omar Bargouti, the founder of the Palestinian Campaign for the academic and cultural boycott to Israel, states: “He is visiting Israel and supporting occupation without making any regard to what Israel is doing in Gaza.”

Moreover, at 1,000 euros a pop, and an anticipated 40,000 attendees, the concert in Hayarkon Park, Tel Aviv, is a pricey privilege to endorse peace.

With the global economic crisis hitting the population of Gaza with renewed vitriol – poverty rates in the Gaza Strip have soared to 79.4% and in the West Bank to 45.7% – would it not be prudent to allocate a portion of the profit to the benefit of those in abject poverty due to the very Israeli restrictions that are benefiting and securing McCartney’s sojourn?

Somehow, the beatific sugar-coating that covers the concert turns bitter on closer inspection, as interest turns to photo-opportunities, and the message of peace once more avoids the necessity of action.