Mostly, that's the argument. No one in Italy tries to dodge the Holocaust. What does happen is, as you said, separating the SRI as "not Italy", which is not quite true but not quite false either; the SRI was heavily occupied, and while collaborationists existed and had a heavy hand in the rounding up of Italian Jews, the operation was mostly a German one, as the comparatively better conditions before the Armistice prove.
Now, that doesn't absolve Italy of the guilt - especially because Jews were treated decently, but Slovenians and Croatians pretty emphatically were not.