The world experienced significant changes in its social and economic lives in 2020–21. Major stock markets experienced an immediate decline. This paper attempts to examine the impact of COVID-19 on stock market performance as well as to identify the differences between the responses of ESG stocks and normal stocks to pandemic conditions in the Arab region. Daily time series for three years between March 2019 and March 2021 were collected for the S&P Pan Arab Composite index and S&P/Hawkamah ESG Pan Arab Index. We used a generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (GARCH) model to measure market shocks and a non-linear autoregressive distributed lagged (NARDL) regression model to display the relationship between COVID-19 measurements and the performance of stock indexes. The findings suggest that the volatilities of ESG portfolios and conventional ones were equally affected in the pre-COVID period. However, in the post-COVID period, the magnitude of volatility in the ESG stock index was significantly less compared to that of the conventional stock index. The results also revealed that in the ESG market, shock tended to remain for a shorter period. Furthermore, the ESG index was not affected by the number of confirmed cases and deaths. However, evidence of asymmetric long-run cointegration existed between the S&P index and number of cases and deaths. Increases in the numbers of cases and deaths caused a decline in market index, whereas the reverse trends were observed in the retreat of the pandemic.