there is room to speculate as to the question of whether the phonencians/caananties were related to the old Hebrews.
Seems to me that I have seen maps of the mesopotamian empires of around 2000 BC that show their boundaries going to modern israel and lebanon.
There are a number of archelogical digs going on currently in Israel which are aimed at settlements of this period. The most important one I think, is at Hazor.
http://unixware.mscc.huji.ac.il/~hatsor/index.html
The reason, in part, these digs are important is because the boundaries of these the mesopotamian empires of the third millennium bc +- coincide with the migration of Abraham.
the suggestion is that while abraham moved west from UR he did not move outside of the political boundaries of which UR was a part.
speculation.
the caananites could well have been a related people to the jews. Therefor, the caananites could have originated in Mesopotamia. certainly when abraham did NOT sacrifice Issac he was going against caananite custom.
later when the old hebrews in the age of kings +-1000 bc-589bc wanted to go native they didn't gobble the gods of the philistines who are said to be greek people. rather they sacrificed their children and put up temples on the mountain tops--as was the custom of the caananites.
anyhow, I'm just speculating.
Except for Laish (Dan), Hazor is the only Palestinian settlement mentioned among the 25,000 cuneiform tablets that compose the royal documents of Mari or Tell Hariri located in modern Syria. Most of these documents connect with the reign of Zimri-Lim, a contemporary of the powerful King Hammurapi of Babylon in the 18th century BCE. So far, there are seven tablets related to Hazor. One of them reveals that Canaanite Hazor was so important that King Hammurapi saw convenient to place two ambassadors there. Other tablets associate Hazor with the trade of tin, for before the revolutionary introduction of iron, tin was essential for the manufacture of bronze weapons.
Scripture Summary
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Joshua destroyed and burned the city of Hazor following his victory over the league of northern Canaanite cities at the "waters of Merom" (Joshua 11:1-11).
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Hazor was assigned to the tribal territory of Naphtali (Joshua 19:36).
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Deborah delivered Israel from the oppression of Jabin, King of Hazor and his general Sisera (Judges 4-5).
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Solomon rebuilt Hazor and fortified it (I Kings 9:15).
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The city of Hazor was captured and destroyed for the last time by the Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser III in 733 BCE (II Kings 15:29).
Strategically located to control the point where trade routes from the north, east and west joined to enter northern Canaan, it is no wonder that, in its heyday, Hazor covered more than 225 acres (making it more than twice the size of Megiddo) and its population numbered close to 40,000.
Texts from Mari (dated to the 18th century BCE) reveal that Hazor had close political and economic ties with Mesopotamia. One text refers to an ambassador of the great lawgiver, Hammurabi, as resident at Hazor, while another mentions Hazor's role in the trade of tin. From the time of the Egyptian New Kingdom (the beginning of the powerful Middle Kingdom 18th Dynasty) until the time of Rameses II, Hazor was a major military objective of those pharaohs who campaigned in Canaan.
http://www.bibarch.com/ArchaeologicalSites/Hazor.htm