SIX hundred thousand on the streets for Palestine.

A reassertion of solidarity with a people facing genocide. A rebuke to Keir Starmer, who hints at further restrictions on protest rights. An answer to the racist right, who organised a march of well over 100,000 last month — there are still more of us than you.

Ministers have revived talk of banning protests based on their “cumulative effect,” an anti-democratic outrage seeking to silence movements based on their very success. The attempt to exploit the appalling anti-semitic murders committed in Manchester to demonise peaceful pro-Palestine demonstrations, which include thousands of Jews themselves, is sickening from a government complicit in poisoning community relations and encouraging racism. Now there is a ceasefire in Gaza we will hear, as we heard in January, that there is no more need to march, though Palestine is still occupied and this truce could end as suddenly and bloodily as the last.

The Palestine solidarity movement is the front line for British socialists. The world’s first live-streamed genocide cannot be normalised or turned into another phase in the eight-decade erasure of Palestine. There are other awful conflicts, but here our own state’s active collaboration with the aggressor puts a special responsibility on us.

The movement is the focus of the assault on democratic freedoms. Its sheer size has so far defied multiple attempts to suppress it: the hundreds of thousands who marched on Saturday are a warning that authoritarian politicians should back off.

And the war has huge political significance. Donald Trump seeks to use it to usher in a “might is right” era in which imperialism no longer pretends to oppose land theft or ethnic cleansing. The British far right see Israel as a poster boy for ethnic nationalism, hence Tommy Robinson’s invitation by its government.

Saturday’s huge Palestine march lays down a marker against this march to barbarism. With positive signs of a reconciliation between the founders of “Your Party” and a growing Green Party turning its fire on landlords and big business, the left has a chance to reclaim the political initiative after a summer of far-right advance.