On a busy Thursday afternoon in the run-up to Christmas week on December 14 last year, last-minute gift shoppers filed to and from shops along Mary Street and in the Jervis Shopping Centre. Just around the corner on Wolfe Tone Street, the Irish office of the French insurance giant Axa was also attracting attention but for a much different reason.  Close to 50 activists from the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign were staging the first of 21 straight weeks of protests outside the company’s Dublin office, calling on the firm to pull all investment in Israeli banks over connections to illegal settlements…