The Navy held a festive display off the Mediterranean coast, parachutists swirled gently to earth, helicopter convoys clattered past, and clusters of fighter-planes, in such close formation that their wings were almost touching, roared overhead trailing lines of smoke in the blue and white colours of the State.
The Israeli military was showing off - demonstrating just a hint of its awesome power to the oohs and aahs of its people, who were yesterday enjoying the first day of a two-day holiday to mark 50 years of independence.
The Israel Defence Forces have plenty to show off about - the heroic achievements of a nascent army in repelling the Arab invasion at the founding of the State, and success in the conflicts of the 1950s (the 1956 Sinai campaign), the 1960s (the Six-Day War of 1967) and the 1970s (the 1973 Yom Kippur War).
But those victories came in the first quarter-century of the State. In the second 25 years, the track-record is rather murkier - featuring 1982's disastrous invasion of Lebanon, the corrupting six years (1987-93) facing off against Palestinian demonstrators in the Intifada, and the ignominy of having to sit out the 1991 Gulf War, while Iraq lobbed three dozen Scud missiles into Tel Aviv.
On this 50th anniversary, as throughout the last 25 years, there is no doubting Israel's military edge over even the combined might of its Arab neighbours. But while American assistance and domestic brain power have gradually enabled Israel to transform itself from the Middle East's David to its Goliath, the State has failed to use that military advantage to achieve peace. In concluding his 1994 peace treaty with Jordan, the then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, a former army chief of staff, described himself proudly as "a soldier in the army of peace".
Since Mr Rabin's assassination in 1995, all the signs show that this battle - the battle for peace - is slipping away from Israel.
Even on Independence Day, unhappy skirmishes were being fought out. At Har Homah, on the outskirts of Jerusalem, where the government plans to build a 6,500-home Jewish neighbourhood, left-wing and right-wing Israelis held opposing demonstrations.
The few hundred left-wingers, "Peace Now" activists, endorse Palestinian arguments that the area is occupied land. But they were outnumbered by several thousand advocates of Jewish building at the site, who cheered and danced as a symbolic cornerstone for the housing project was poured in concrete, and whose banners castigated the Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, for letting his fears of adverse Arab and international reactions delay the start of building work.
On the other side of Jerusalem, Mr Faisal Husseini, the Palestinian politician who has been at the forefront of Arab opposition to the Har Homah project, visited the hilltop ruins, high above the main road into the city from Tel Aviv, where his father, Abdel Kader Husseini, was killed leading Palestinian fighters in the 1948 War of Independence.
"Either we can fight each other until the end of the world," he mused sadly, "or we can try and find a way to live on this land and share it on equal terms, to have two states."
At his official celebration party, Israel's President Ezer Weizman spoke along similar lines. Coexistence, he said, had to be built "not on how many tanks I have and how many guns they'll have, but on understanding that we were destined to live together."
If genuine, such mutual readiness for compromise would guarantee a breakthrough in the deadlocked peace process, which limps off to London on Monday.
Meanwhile, the Bat Sheva dance troupe cancelled its appearance at a Gala jubilee concert in Jerusalem last night after being asked not to partially disrobe in one of their routines because of objections from ultra-Orthodox politicians.
A spokeswoman for the company said the contents of the performance had been changed under government pressure - but the troupe's director resigned in protest. Ultra-Orthodox parties, a third of Mr Netanyahu's governing coalition, demanded that the government drop the performance saying it "expresses overt and intentional contempt for the sensibilities of the religious public".