- Ethiopian Jews seem more left-leaning? Not completely sure on this.
Quite the opposite.
Yeah, Ethiopians are solid Likud.
It's an incidental feature of Israeli voting patterns being dominated by ethnic and sectarian cleavages; Sephardic and Mizrahi families (who arrived following ethnic cleansing in the wider region from the 1950s onwards) are on average much lower down the income scale than Ashkenazi ones, etc.
And also because Left and Right don't exactly mean the same in Israel as elsewhere, denoting positions on existential/peace/security (use whatever word of combination of words you like best) as much as socio-economic matters. So pretty much uniquely for a secular party of the mainstream right the Likud is traditionally not explicitly antisocialist.
But then with party loyalties being so weak in Israel it's probably not so wise to act as if generalisations of the norm are ironcast or something; certainly the patterns on display in the 2006 election were... er... different.
In addition to the socio-economic factors Al mentions, the Labour movement was extremely Ashkenazi-centric and engaged in institutional discrimination against Mizrahi Jews in the country's early days. This was relevant not only in the political realm, but also in the economic and cultural spheres: traditional Mizrahi music was not played on the radio, for instance. Both politically and culturally, the Likud was much more in sync with Mizrahim than Labour, so when Likud emerged as the main alternative to Labour, most Mizrahim became solid Likud voters. Still, these groups are perhaps the most solid Likud demographic and certainly the ones that were part of the reason why Likud's victory in 2015 was surprisingly large and why turnout was surprisingly high: even if some of these people sometimes don't vote, they identify as Likud. Bibi's last-minute appeal worked with them.
You see this on the map: in places where Mizrahim form the large majority of the population (especially the so-called "development towns" that were built in the 1950s to accommodate the immigration waves from the Middle East), Likud support was through the roof. Likud received 23% of the national vote but 41% in Or Yehuda, 39% in Kiryat Gat, 43% in Sderot, 39% in Kiryat Shmona... and this doesn't even take into account Mizrahi Shas voters who, too, like Likud and Netanyahu. It also doesn't take into account Kulanu, the slightly less right-wing alternative to Likud led by Moshe Kahlon, who is Libyan. Likud+Shas+Kulanu got 35% nationally but 55% in Ofakim, 58% in Sderot, 57% in Kiryat Gat and 62% in Kiryat Shmona. They got 67% in the heavily Mizrahi neighborhood of Pat in Jerusalem (49% for Likud). Another 9% went to YB.
In general, newer immigrant wave groups all vote for the right. While Labour still got a sizeable share of the Russian vote in the 1990s, Russians have become a very (secular) right-wing demographic since the 2000s, generally voting for Likud or Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu. Again, this is visible on the map too. Likud + YB got 28.5% nationally but, for example, 55% in Ashkelon, 44% in Ashdod, 46% in Nahariyya and 45% in Karmiel.
"Cultural" reasons are most important here. Most new immigrants feel that the Israeli left is so far away from them culturally. In some ways there's really two different Israels, and the left just doesn't seem to appeal to the other Israel. Ari Shavit coined an interesting term for this: the WASPs (white Ashkenazi supporters of peace) vs. the rest. (Of course it's all a lot more ambiguous than this, but it's an important part of the political reality in Israel.) "The rest" may vote for a centrist party that's still reasonably hawkish and not adversarial to a more traditional Jewish lifestyle, but the large majority of them won't vote for the traditional Labour left.
