Professor Beth Tanner is writing a book a concise history of Israel and Judah. She poses the question what do you call the region. She observes that Palestine is a Roman term. So we might want to avoid it because it is clearly anachronistic. Further the Roman term was the designation of the region during the British colonial rule in the area. The situation is complicated even more because the language of Palestine has been in the forefront of the conflict between  groups since the birth of the  modern nation of Israel.
Professor Tanner raises an interesting question for our Christian Scriptures class. Naming land is an expression of power. Whether one is a mapmaker or a historian to name a section of land puts one amidst an exercise of power. Â Let me give you an example. In 1982 Argentina sought to assert sovereignty over the Islas Malvinas. In 1982 British newspapers reported that Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands a British colony since 1833. You can tell the politics of the commentators often by their decision to call the islands by their British name Falklands or their Spanish name Malvinas.
The Bible itself gives no easy help. The phrase “to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites†names the land by listing the occupants This list of occupants of the land changes in order but the people groups are fairly consistent.  (See Ex 3:8, 17; 13:5; 23:23, 28; 33:2; 34:11; Deu 20:17; Jos 3:10; 9:1) If we take these references as central then we could use the term Canaan as a broad geographical reference to the land of each of the people groups named in these lists.
Canaan is problematic for other reasons.  The promise of the land is the promise that the Israelites would have the land of the Canaanites, Hivites, Perrezites and Canaannites. Niels Peter Lemche in his book The Canaanites and Their Land argues that this easy slip from these sorts of references to posit a culturally coherent Canaanite menace is precisely one of the key missteps in biblical studies today.  For Lemche there never was a land of Canaan. He would replace the term Canaanite religion as the religious competitor of Yahwistic pre-exilic religion. Instead he suggest that there was diversity in West Semitic religion. One wonders if one might called the West Semitic  region.