On July 19, 1984, a 21-year-old worker at a shop in Dublin, Ireland, refused to handle the sale of grapefruit from the apartheid regime of South Africa. Mary Manning’s union, the Irish Distributive and Administrative Trade Union, had directed its members not to accept products from South Africa in protest at the discriminatory practices in that country. Manning was suspended from her job and she and 10 other Dunnes Stores workers went on strike. She struggled to make ends meet during the three-year-long  walkout but she refused to surrender to brutality, even in a country far from where she lived, and stood up for her principles.

Slowly, other union and community activists joined the protest and generated much publicity and pressure. Eventually, in April 1987, the government of Ireland banned the importation of all South African goods — the first complete ban of South African imports by a Western government.

Apartheid was a system of institutionalized racial segregation that began in South Africa in 1948, the same year that Israel launched a war against democracy in Palestine. It rejected the idea of a pluralistic state to create one based on a religion, Judaism, that meant excluding the Muslims and Christians who made up more than 70 percent of the territory’s population.

The irony of Israel’s version of apartheid rising alongside that of South Africa’s is striking. The Western world........

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