According to the U. of Pennsylvania's Musuem of Archaeology and Anthropology - there were a mixture of peoples living in "Canaan" or ancient "Israel".
The land known as Canaan was situated in the territory of the southern Levant, which today encompasses Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, Jordan, and the southern portions of Syria and Lebanon. Throughout time, many names have been given to this area including Palestine, Eretz-Israel, Bilad es-Shem, the Holy Land and Djahy. The earliest known name for this area was "Canaan."
The inhabitants of Canaan were never ethnically or politically unified as a single nation. They did, however, share sufficient similarities in language and culture to be described together as "Canaanites."
In addition - there is no appreciable ethnic difference between early Israelites and other arabs - they were all Semetic people whose cultural, linguistic, and in certain cases, ancestral origins trace back to the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula. There was a lot of migration in and out of these lands. Some three centuries prior to the Hebrew occupation of Canaan, the land had been conquered by Egyptian armies and for a long time formed part of the Egyptian Empire. Even if you consider Israeli's as non-arab, surely the Egyptions were arabs and they apparently preceeded Hebrew rule of the area.
