EAT, sleep, protest. This has become an almost daily routine for tens and even hundreds of thousands of people marching for a free Palestine in cities and towns across Britain and around the world.

In Manchester, they have been marching weekly and in London monthly and in massive numbers, to call on the British government to end its complicity in Israel’s deadly and illegal genocide in Gaza that began almost 21 months ago.

But after the US joined Israel over the weekend, launching bombing raids on Iran and targeting its nuclear sites, several hundred people gathered in London once again for a Monday evening protest called to take place at the US embassy on the banks of the River Thames. Instead, authorities refused to allow protesters close to the embassy, moving the rally onto the riverwalk.

“It’s an absolute disgrace that we haven’t been allowed to assemble outside the US embassy,” said Liz Wheatley of Camden Unison. “It just shows which side the police are on and which side our government is on.”

US President Donald Trump’s decision to deploy US bombers and bunker busters in an attempt to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities prompted many to fear an escalation into a wider war and brought back memories of the disastrous war in Iraq that lasted from March 20 2003 to December 15 2011, killing more than a quarter of a million Iraqis.

That conflict triggered mass mobilisations, including the biggest public rally in British history on February 15 2003, when 1.5 million people marched through the streets of London against the threatened attack on Iraq. Then prime minister, Tony Blair, sent British troops anyway, and the marches continued.

“This is a time when everyone’s got to stand up and be counted,” said Chris Nineham, vice-chair of the Stop the War Coalition and chief steward of the national Palestine demonstrations, when we spoke at Monday’s rally. Nineham is facing charges under the Public Order Act, alongside Palestine Solidarity Campaign director Ben Jamal, after being wrestled to the ground and arrested during the January 18 Palestine protest at Whitehall. The trial is due to take place on July 7-8.

“Everyone who’s ever been on one of the Palestine demonstrations needs to come out, everyone who’s been on the Palestine demonstrations needs to reach out into their communities, into their workplaces, into their universities in order to strengthen and deepen the movement. This is an absolutely critical moment in history,” Nineham said.

Although, unlike during the Iraq war, no British troops have been deployed to Iran or to directly support Israel’s illegal aggression, Nineham believes the foundations are there in the current movement to dramatically increase its numbers.

“Obviously, the use of US and British troops on the ground was a factor,” Nineham said of the anti-Iraq war protests. “But the legacy of the Iraq movement lives on, and it partly lives on through the Palestine movement, and we have seen huge demonstrations over the last 20 months which can form the launch pad for a wider anti-war movement.”

John Rees, a founder of Stop the War Coalition, one of the two groups alongside Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament that called Monday’s emergency rally, also recalled the disastrous Iraq venture when he said: “The whole history of US and Western intervention in the Middle East, the whole history of imperialism shows this: that if the 101st Airborne do the regime-changing, they end up doing the ruling afterwards.”

His view reflected a consensus among the speakers that alarmism about Iran’s potential nuclear capabilities was a pretext for attacks aimed at forcing a regime change in the country.

“I think a really important piece of information is that John Brennan, the former director of the CIA, who is hardly a friend of the anti-war movement, has said today on TV that Iran is nowhere near having nuclear weapons and is not an imminent threat to anyone,” said Zack Polanski, deputy leader of the Green Party and who is running for party leadership, when we spoke at the rally.

“So the fact that we are seeing a lot of the Establishment media go into overdrive to push the so-called Iranian nuclear threat as if it’s just happening in a few days’ time feels very reminiscent of 2003,” Polanski said. The official reason offered for the war in Iraq was that the country possessed weapons of mass destruction, a justification that proved to be not only false but a lie.

Speaker after speaker called for the Iranian people to be allowed to decide their own political future. “We’ve seen the script before, Iraq, Libya, Syria; isolate, destabilise, destroy,” said Maryam Eslamdoust, general secretary of the TSSA rail union, who was speaking in a personal capacity as an Iranian. “This is a strategy to collapse a nation, its infrastructure, its economy, its morale.”

“We said right at the beginning of the Israeli offensive against Gaza that this war will spread,” said Rees. “That if Netanyahu isn’t stopped, he won’t stop at Gaza. And he didn’t. He didn’t stop at Gaza. He didn’t stop at Lebanon. He didn’t stop at Yemen. He isn’t going to stop. Because this is an expansionist regime who can only survive by trampling on the bodies of its supposed enemies.”

Alluding to the Home Secretary’s declared intention to ban the direct action group Palestine Action, prompting a rally earlier that day in Trafalgar Square in their support, Rees warned, “This is a message to Starmer and to Yvette Cooper: this movement will not be intimidated, it will not be driven off the streets, it will not be proscribed or banned or banished, it will not refuse to organise.”

Hours after the rally ended, Trump bragged that he had secured a ceasefire between Iran and Israel. Once again, history repeated itself, with the US president perhaps forgetting that “ceasefire” is not a word in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s vocabulary. Four days after an agreed ceasefire with Hamas in March, Israeli forces resumed bombing Gaza.

On Tuesday, Israel was on the offensive again, with Defence Minister Israel Katz announcing his government had ordered “intense strikes” on Tehran, the Iranian capital. As with its previous ceasefire violations, Israel tried to justify its warmongering by blaming the other side for violating the truce. But Iran has strongly denied the claim.

All of this, said the speakers on Monday, should prompt Starmer to speak out and take a strong stand. “Starmer should be front and centre condemning it,” said Polanski of the US raid. “But actually what we see is little subtle hints that seem to be getting more and more blatant that actually this is totally fine with the Prime Minister.”

Nineham agreed, saying the government “have to openly call out the Israelis, they have to call out the US, they have to support any initiatives on a world stage demanding an end to hostilities, they have to cut all arms sales to Israel, a full arms embargo, but really they need to cut all diplomatic political ties of any kind with Israel.

“That, given the global political role of Britain, would send a huge signal, would be a big blow against Trump, even though militarily Britain is relatively insignificant,” Nineham continued. “In terms of its political positioning as the most high-profile ally of the US, what the government does in Britain politically is very important on the world stage. That would make a difference. It would help to isolate Trump and the Israelis even further.”

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland. She is currently covering events in London.