This paper questions whether the repeated failure of the Israelis and Palestinians to reach a final settlement after twenty years of negotiations implicates their commitment to peace or the interim power-sharing formula they committed to? Using news reports and narratives from the height of Oslo’s implementation period, this paper will link the well known refrain of mutual recriminations over violence and the scope of withdrawals to the quid-pro-quo sequencing stipulated by the original 1993 framework agreement. Drawing on established theories of the durable settlement of internal armed conflict, I will show that this cycle of distrust, which became the hallmark of the Oslo proccess, was utterly predictable. Absent third party security guarantees, studies of the termination of internal armed conflict have consistently shown that the only method of getting nervous parties to implement their commitments and make further concessions for peace is by binding them into power-sharing schemes based on the mutual assumption of risk. As this paper will show, Oslo’s power sharing provisions lacked this essential element of simaltaneous, mutual risk. On the contrary, the transitional framework is designed to mitigate the risks associated with Israel’s initial concessions by qualifying troop redeployments on the ability of the Palestinians to assume security control. While this formula is easily explained in terms of Israel’s perception of the risks associated with the interim period and the imbalance of power during the negotiations, the quid-pro-quo sequencing of the concessions failed to reassure either party. Instead, the reliance on partial measures only served to increase mutual skepticism, embolden spoiler factions and bog the process down in endless haggling over whether the conditions of the previous concession had actually been met. Despite this dismal record, the same framework has been recycled in each subsequent initiative from the 2002 “Road Map” to President Obama’s May 2011 Middle East policy speech. The danger in conditioning the realization of a viable Palestine and a secure Israel on another round of interim benchmarks, which have been consistently shown to fail, is that it will cast the entire premise of the two-state solution into irretrievable doubt. This paper will conclude with the recommendation that during the current impasse scholars and policy makers should work to encourage the adoption of a new interim framework which includes either external security guarantees or an exchange of mutual reinforcing reciprocal risks.