The 10 signatories — of both the four-page letter and the report — include Volcker himself, former national security advisers Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, former senator Chuck Hagel, former World Bank president James Wolfensohn, former U.S. Trade Representative Carla Hills, former congressman Lee Hamilton and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Thomas Pickering.

My understanding is their thinking coincides in significant degree with that of both George Mitchell, Obama's Middle East envoy, and Gen. James Jones, Obama's national security adviser, who worked on security issues with Israelis and Palestinians in the last year of the Bush administration, an often frustrating experience.

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The need for that incentive is reflected in the four core proposals of what the authors calls "a last chance for a fair and sustainable Middle East peace accord." Taken together, they constitute the start of an essential re-balancing of America's Bush-era Israel-can-do-no-wrong policy.

The first is clear U.S. endorsement of a two-state solution based on the lines of June 4, 1967, with minor, reciprocal land swaps where necessary. That means removing all West Bank settlements except in some heavily populated areas abutting Jerusalem — and of course halting the unacceptable ongoing construction of new ones.

The second is establishing Jerusalem as home to the Israeli and Palestinian capitals. Jewish neighborhoods would be under Israeli sovereignty and Arab neighborhoods under Palestinian sovereignty, with special arrangements for the Old City providing unimpeded access to holy sites for all communities.

The third is major financial compensation and resettlement assistance in a Palestinian state for refugees, coupled with some formal Israeli acknowledgment of responsibility for the problem, but no generalized right of return.

The fourth is the creation of an American-led, U.N.-mandated multinational force for a transitional period of up to 15 years leading to full Palestinian control of their security.