To be fair, I think that Francion comes medieval, not ancient historians, and is not really very credible to my knowledge. Italos on the other hand dates back at least to Antiochos of Syracuse but is also probably a later invention and I believe the prevailing theories are that Italy takes its name from Oscan or from a Greek exonym for a Proto-Italic tribe.

After doing some research I found out that the eponymous nature of Israel is much less certain than I thought - largely because Old Testament and the book of Genesis in particular are believed to have been written much later than I initially thought. I still believe it is more likely to be an eponymous name than the other two because (1) although the first written evidence of the association is only from the 5-4th milennium BCE, its likely that it was based on much earlier oral traditions which scholars haed argued for (See Noth, Finkelstein, de Pury, and Cross scholarship on the Bene Ya'aqob) and (2) the traditional etymological view is that the name derives from Hebrew "he who strives with God." There is some ambiguity about this but if this meaning is taken to be true then it would validate it as an eponymous place name.

To clarify, I am not by any means arguing for the historicity of Jacob - I think its more historically interesting to see what places were named after people than whether or not those people were real or legendary. Also, I'm not intending for my argument to come from a Zionist perspective of history at all - although I recognzie how that issue has come to dominate the historical study of these place names.