President Shimon Peres said in Zagreb on Friday that Israel now sees Croatia as a friend because it has decided not to repeat past errors.
The country was pro-Nazi during World War II, became independent in 1991 and sympathetic to that historical era in the 1990s – prompting Israel to hold off recognizing it until 1997.
Since 2000, Croatia’s governments have denounced fascism. Peres’s predecessor, Moshe Katsav, visited in 2001."
