Reddit reviews In God's Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire (Ancient Warfare and Civilization)

You asked for everything really, but here is a selection I personally like that is more focused on the biography of Muhammad.

For Muslim books on the biography of the Prophet, I highly recommend:

A Biography of the Prophet of Islam: In the Light of the Original Sources, an Analytical Study

In the Footsteps of the Prophet: Lessons from the Life of Muhammad

Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources

On the more academic side of his life and following centuries, I recommend:

Muhammad: A Very Short Introduction

Hadith: Muhammad's Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World

In God's Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire

The Death of a Prophet: The End of Muhammad's Life and the Beginnings of Islam

For the four best primary sources of his biography translated into English:

The Life of Muhammad: Al-Waqidi's Kitab al-Maghazi

The Life of the Prophet Muhammad: Al-Sira al-Nabawiyya

The Life of Muhammad

The Expeditions: An Early Biography of Muhammad

No you're right the majority did settle in the west (ie. the Maghrebi countries + Libya), because it was viewed almost as a frontier by the soldiers in the Islamic armies who wanted to settle there. There were also later migrations that occurred for political reasons the most famous being the Banu Hilal and Banu Sulaym in the Middle Ages.

With the Levant it was largely the same as in other countries. When the Arab Muslims arrived they established themselves as the local elite and to this day many of the old notable Palestinian families like the Nusaybah are descended from Arabs who did settle in the country during the Islamic conquests. The armies and administrators were all Arab (in the early years) but like I said mass population displacement didn't really occur and Palestinians at large are generally believed to be descended from a mix of the numerous peoples who have inhabited and moved to the land over the centuries, everyone from Greeks and Crusaders to Turks and ancient Jews. Over the centuries after conquest more and more of these people adopted Islam as a faith in order to obtain more social privileges, something that initially caught the invading Arabs by surprise. Since you'll probably ask I'm getting most of this info from the books In God's Path by Hoyland and The Great Caliphs by Bennison.

Thanks for the kind words, I have an intense love-hate relationship with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (I'm literally always either the most "pro-Israel" or "pro-Palestinian" person in whatever room I'm in, not that I care for those dichotomous and ill defined terms) and nothing to do today so I've just been popping in to comment periodically.