But behind the scenes, the settlement is a pretty good case study of the ugly ways America’s ideological divides — in this case, over Israel and Palestine — play out in courtroom warfare involving placid institutions that aren’t accustomed to taking part in blood sport.

Look at the legalese and it’s clear that the case of U.S. ex rel. TZAC v. The Middle East Institute is about more than just a misunderstanding over pandemic loan-forgiveness rules. It’s right there in the title of the case, where there’s a third entity alongside the feds and the think tank: TZAC, the Zionist Advocacy Center, which first brought the case under a law that lets private citizens file whistleblower suits against entities they believe have defrauded the government.

As its name suggests, TZAC is not an organization devoted primarily to safeguarding the sanctity of Covid relief dollars. It doesn’t have a website, a meaningful social media presence, a public relations operation or any staff whatsoever beyond a single lawyer named David Abrams. But it does have a long track record of targeting organizations from the Carter Center to Norwegian People’s Aid to Doctors Without Borders.

The common denominator? All of them, in Abrams’ expansive view, are hostile to Israel.

“I’m a passionate Zionist and I’m also an attorney,” Abrams told me. “And so it’s natural to say, ‘Well, how can I combine those two things?’ And that’s what I started doing about 10 years ago.”

An employment lawyer by day, Abrams took advantage of a legal concept called qui tam, under which private individuals who instigate a prosecution — known as “relators” — can get a share of the damages recovered by the government. In Abrams’ case, he went looking for violations of the False Claims Act, an old whistleblower standby that penalizes people and companies if applications for federal loans or grants include false statements.

“We’re in America,” Abrams said. “People have an absolute right to attack Israel unfairly, to slander Israel and so on. However, from my perspective, they don’t have the right to take government money to support their work that they’re not entitled to.”

That’s one way to look at it. But a less sympathetic observer might use a different framework: This is bad-faith use of the legal system to harass, intimidate or punish foes who disagree with you over something unrelated.

“We believe that the Zionist Advocacy Center case against us was vexatious, and was brought with the intention to delegitimize our work in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory, and throw sand in the wheels of our advocacy,” said William Bell, the head of Middle East policy for Christian Aid, a British organization that prevailed in 2022 after five years of legal battles over an Abrams suit dealing with the group’s U.S. government contract.

“Christian Aid is not the first charity to be targeted in this way. There has been a pattern of targeting organizations that are critical of human rights violations by Israel; a strategy of lawfare.”

Abrams himself has used that same term. On TZAC’s Facebook page — which hasn’t been updated since 2021 — he once advertised a talk about his work called “Lawfare for Fun and Profit.”

He’s not kidding about the profit part: Under the law, relators can snag a significant chunk of the money recovered by the government. For his work on the Middle East Institute matter, he got $71,855.80, according to court documents, not a bad haul for $1,800 worth of his legal fees. (He says the money enables him to take pro bono cases like a New Jersey administrative procedure involving an embroiderer who was investigated after refusing to embroider an anti-Israel message on a garment.)

In his early years as a relator, Abrams looked at recipients of USAID contracts for evidence that they made false statements on mandatory forms requiring NGOs to affirm that they don’t support any entities that have been placed on U.S. terror lists. Those affirmations, known as Anti-Terrorism Certifications, can be easy to fall afoul of — not in Washington, but on the ground where humanitarian organizations do their work.

Norwegian People’s Aid, for instance, got a U.S. government contract for work in South Sudan, but Abrams’ 2015 complaint focused on the group’s mine-clearing work in Iran and democracy-training work in Gaza that wasn’t funded by Washington but allegedly included members of groups on the terror list. The organization eventually paid the U.S. government over $2 million to settle the matter, which would have netted Abrams over $200,000.

Abrams also pushes iffy interpretations of the law. In the complaint against the Carter Center, TZAC asserted that the organization had made false claims because, among other things, the center once hosted a meeting in Ramallah between the former president and various Palestinian parties. “The [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine] representative was supplied with the physical assets of fruits, cookies, bottled water, and presumably other foods and drinks,” the suit sniffed. The government ultimately dropped the case.

While TZAC’s foreign aid cases generally involve large organizations getting large U.S. contracts to do work far from Washington, it was Covid that brought Abrams into the world of Beltway think tanks and advocacy groups.

During the pandemic, the government’s crisis response involved programs designed to get money out the door in a hurry. Plenty of organizations, desperate to keep the lights on and pay their staffs, didn’t sweat the details too closely, nor did the government, whose main goal was keeping the economy afloat. One of those pesky details: The second draw of PPP loans required recipients to certify that they were “not a business concern or entity primarily engaged in political or lobbying activities, including any entity that is organized for research or for engaging in advocacy in areas such as public policy or political strategy or otherwise describes itself as a think tank in any public documents.”

Sensing an opportunity, Abrams filed actions against MEI; the progressive-leaning Institute for Policy Studies; and a small social justice group called South Asian Americans Leading Together. Under the whistleblower laws, his claims were filed under seal, so the organizations didn’t learn of his identity until things were well underway. All ultimately settled. Abrams says he has several other cases currently under seal. (The think tanks declined to comment on the specifics of the cases.)

Even if the suits are unsuccessful, people who’ve been on the receiving end of Abrams cases told me, the experience can be time-consuming and intimidating. Christian Aid told me they racked up £700,000 in legal bills.

But the thing is, his suits aren’t all unsuccessful. Plenty of people, sometimes for innocent reasons, got Covid money they weren’t entitled to. Unlike typical whistleblower situations, where someone would have to have deep inside knowledge to prove wrongdoing, the ones involving a think tank that obtained PPP funds only require a visit to the organization’s website to find easy evidence of think tanking.

It’s easy to dismiss Abrams as a serial litigant who picks his cases for political reasons. His history includes a Foreign Agent registration for an Israeli legal organization that gets money from the government. Yet the False Claims law doesn’t care. The measure, which dates to the fight against corrupt military contractors during the Civil War, is designed to incentivize people to expose fraud, whether or not they’re disinterested observers who blow the whistle for noble reasons.

According to Erika Kelton, a qui tam expert and a partner at the whistleblower firm Phillips & Cohen, it remains rare for the False Claims Act to be weaponized for political purposes. Most cases of defrauding the government — like putting sawdust inside bullets, one of the infamous Civil War frauds that led to the law — still require the kind of investigating that an ideological warrior spelunking around the internet isn’t positioned to do.

“I think that the motive of an individual is kind of irrelevant,” Kelton said. “And in a lot of ways, that’s good. But then you get results like this, where they’re not wrong. But it’s unfortunate when a statute is used for ideological reasons or for political reasons.”

My hunch is that it won’t stay rare for long. If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that the ratchet of polarization only goes one way. An innovative way to make legal trouble for one side will eventually be matched by an even more innovative way to make trouble for the other side. There’s no reason to think D.C. think tanks and NGOs, not historically a hotbed of whistleblowing and courtroom intrigue, are immune.

As Abrams put it: “Lawfare, just like litigation itself, can potentially be good or bad depending on the specific facts and circumstances.” He’s surely not the only one with that point of view.