This is a fascinating, exhaustive, and impressive history of this perennially contested region. Your title, in a sense, says it all: “the land between.” In short, it was squarely in the path of human migration, trade, strife, and empire-building from peoples of all directions, over both sea and land. No wonder it’s complicated! My own humble ( hence useless) suggestion is that the UN intervene and negotiate a whole new state or other political entity called something like “Levantia” or simply “The Levant.” The constitution for such an entity would guarantee both (1) basic citizenship rights for all law-abiding inhabitants; and (2) limited local and regional autonomy so that separate ethnic or religious communities would have greater authority over their subjects than in other nations with less bitter and deeply rooted animosity. Thus, for example, Jews seeking to settle in Palestinian communities would need permission from local Palestinian authorities to live there, and vice versa. A binational (or multi-national state, in short